Selected Poems (Mark Strand)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 1979

Have I really been gone so long?? It didn't feel long to me at all. I apologize, dear readers. I won't say it won't happen again, but I'm in the middle of at least three books right now, so I'm bound to finish at least one soon.

In a wonderful YA book called Baby, the main character's grandmother explains to her granddaughter why she bothers to read poetry (in this case, William Carlos Williams) to a small child: "She doesn't need to understand, dear. She likes the way the words sound."

That is, in a nutshell, how I feel about Strand's poetry. Very little of what he says makes any sense to me. His poetry is almost never narrative, and though it's often in the first or second person, he relies mainly on images of inanimate objects to carry his poetry.

And in that particular arena, he succeeds. His poetry is among the most atmospheric (often creepily so) that I've ever read. Consider:

The Sleep

There is the sleep of my tongue
speaking a language I can never remember --
words that enter the sleep of words
once they are spoken.

There is the sleep of one moment
inside the next, lengthening the night,
and the sleep of the window
turning the tall sleep of trees into glass.

The sleep of novels as they are read is soundless
like the sleep of dresses on the warm bodies of women.
And the sleep of thunder gathering dust on sunny days
and the sleep of ashes long after.

The sleep of wind has been known to fill the sky.
The long sleep of air locked in the lungs of the dead.
The sleep of a room with someone inside it.
Ever the wooden sleep of the moon is possible.

And there is the sleep that demands I lie down
and be fitted to the dark that comes upon me
like another skin in which I shall never be found,
out of which I shall never appear.

How I feel about "The Sleep" is actually an excellent example of exactly how I feel about all of Strand's poetry: I appreciate it for its technical brilliance; I am mildly haunted by it for a moment; but in the long run, I'm not moved. In a very, very long book (long for poetry, i.e. over 150 pages), there were very few lines that jumped out at me for tucking away in my subconscious.

Strand's style, to be perfectly honest, can also get a bit tiresome. Lots of short declarative sentences with simplistic constructions, long stanzas, the same images used over and over (the moon, bones, night, shadows, and whiteness, to randomly name five).

If you want to read any of Strand, I'd suggest an earlier standalone work, not an anthology. (I liked the poems at the beginning of this book better than those toward the middle and end.) It may be more of a book to study than to enjoy.

Recommended? Totally a matter of taste.

Ararat (Louise Glück)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 1990

I cannot even tell you all how miserably disappointing this book was to me. I've read one other Glück book -- Vita Nova, which is one of my all-time favorite books of poetry. So I picked up Ararat expecting the same exquisitely refined turns of phrase and beautiful images.

But Ararat is a bitter, clumsy book that focuses on one topic -- her family -- with the singleminded focus of a therapy patient. There was not a scrap of enjoyment to be had from any of the poems. Depressing poetry can illuminate circumstances without being easy to read, but most of the pieces in Ararat read like lines cribbed from Glück's diary. She writes of her sister: "That means/she's going to feel deprived again." Of her mother and aunt: "It's how they were raised: you show respect by fighting./To let up insults the opponent." Of her father: "he showed/contempt for emotion." There is no maturity or art in her observations. It's a rotten read, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Recommended? No. A thousand times no.

Delights & Shadows (Ted Kooser)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2004

Ted Kooser is a poet of the moment. For the most part, he eschews the sweeping statements poets often make ("To be or not to be," anyone?) and concentrates instead on minute observations about the natural world and people around him. His style is prose-y in its adherence to normal sentence structure and grammar (something I, for one, am thankful for), and he makes little to no use of stanza breaks. He is precise and never jarring in his use of descriptive language.

The end result is a series of still lifes that are like reflections in a calm pond: while there may be deeper currents underneath, those currents are not overly accessible, and the image is all that will remain with most readers.

Here's a short example:

Biker

Pulling away from a stoplight
with a tire's sharp bark,
he lifts his scuffed boot and kicks at the air,
and the old dog of inertia gets up with a growl
and shrinks out of the way.


It's a very well-crafted metaphor, certainly, but I have a hard time getting beneath that to any other sort of truth.

This is not to say that this kind of poetry can't be beautiful or meaningful. It is just a certain style that you may like or not, depending on your poetical predilections. I for one am more fond of poetry that is a little more outwardly emotional, that perhaps pulls the focus back from the beauty of the image and lets some greater image resolve.

It's not surprising, then, that my favorite poems in Delights & Shadows are the ones in which Kooser breaks his own rules a little and allows a little of himself to shine through his work. There's a handful of poems, maybe a half-dozen or so out of the maybe six dozen in the collection, that appeals more to my sensibilities. Obviously the following poem is not representative of the collection, but it is representative of that dazzling handful. I'll leave you all with it:

After Years

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Recommended? Depends very much on your own tastes. I can't say I'll go back to this book fondly over the years, but it's high-quality, whether or not you like his style.

A Deed to the Light (Jeanne Murray Walker)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2004

Although I read a good deal of poetry (and write a good deal as well), poetry often seems like a chore to me. I usually approach an unfamiliar volume of poetry with my trusty mechanical pencil in hand, ready to underline phrases or bracket passages that jump out at me. Because it can be so dense and confusing, some of the joy is often lost for me -- W.S. Merwin's The Second Four Book of Poems, which I still have not yet managed to struggle all the way through, is an excellent example of this.

I sat down with A Deed to the Light several nights ago, ready to go at it with my pencil, and found after a few pages that it was completely unnecessary. It is not that her poetry is simplistic; rather, it is that she paints her images and metaphors with such clarity that I didn't need the academic concentration to get through it. For the first time in a long time, I found myself simply enjoying a book of poetry, taking it in, empathizing with the poet, all without the intense scrutiny that so much poetry requires.

Some people may not enjoy her clear, concise, autobiographical style. There are many poets and readers of poetry who prefer poetry that is as far removed from prose as possible. I myself choose accessibility over opacity any day. Walker's style is the sort of style I aspire to as a poet.

A lot of her poems struck a chord with me, but this is the one that resonated most strongly as I read (probably because of the New Year's party I recently attended).

Dinner Party

We lounge amid the wreckage of this lovely evening,
next to little pelts of scooped-out cantaloupe
on blue Spanish plates, while Billie Holliday
drifts through us like fog through trees.
We have almost made it together inside loneliness,
almost reached that perfect shadowy place
where it doesn't matter what we say, the others
grasp it. We are chords in a new progression
into stillness, a new rendition of "All of Me,"
though none of us, if asked, could tell
what taught us such love was possible.

And then suddenly we're back in history,
as if a gust of gravity had swept in. Or
the rubber band snapped. And we're pulling on
our coats, reaching for polite good-bye phrases
like rain hats, remembering there's happiness
at home, too, and a Posturepedic mattress
and a dog to walk. We look plain again,
standing around like extras in a movie.
What happened among us may be true and secret.
It may be everything. But the night won't talk,
and none of us can find the word to loosen
its tongue. It was fun, we say later. It was fun.

Recommended? Yes. If you haven't made the leap as a reader into modern poetry, make this book your training wheels.