Category: Books to Read (Page 6 of 14)

Amy King's The Missing Museum (2016)

A month ago I received a review copy of Amy King's new book of poems, Missing Museum. I know only a bit about Amy King from Goodreads, reading news stories about writers who are aggravated Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize, and seeing her on one of the ModPo MOOC panels. I also quoted one of her essays in my eBook, Writing in the Age of Narcissism. But I hadn't yet had an opportunity to read her work.

In this book I was initially fascinated by her creative but non-integral titles like “Pussy Pussy Sochi Pussy Putin Sochi Queer Queer Pussy” and “One Bird Behind One Bird” and "Imperfect Yet.” The titles felt like random good lines being put to good post-modern use. The first and ending poems also experiment with ALL CAPS, making them challenging little book ends. If every poem had been in ALL CAPS, I'd probably still be reading them.

Once deep into the poems, they reminded me of poems by Jim Carroll due to their kind of gritty, skin-ripping quality. Or Henry Rollins. These poems are unkempt, full of street-intellectualizing that is delightfully pushy.

She had me in the prologue with "purveyors of knowledge, but too, your emotions are an intelligence.” Not only is this a defense of the emotional, I feel the entire set is writing about various intelligences: equations, indices, data, “math life,” points, beliefs and theories that aren’t adding up. In “Pussy Riot Rush Hour” “we incomplete ourselves.” In “Violent Blossoming Cities Ask How to Hear the Song” you can “centrifuge yourself.” These feel like riffs that solve for disruption.

In the book's back-advertising, John Ashbery is quoted describing King’s poems as “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” That’s a good way of saying it (I guess). She's writing in a very intense now-ness. But I would like to separate King from Ashbery here because I think she’s moving in another direction from the Ashbery school. These poems move in and out of accessibility. There are bits of straight-shooting I loved in poems like “A Room Without Walls” invoking whiskey and Lionel Richie. There's movement here where some Ashbery-students stall. She's not stuck in the same whirlpool of an old experiment. Literally, “the room opens into a field.”

King can give even her enigmatic-ness a precision in one section but then provide some slack and sense in another. We relax from earlier abstractions and the contrast is satisfying and interesting.  There's also emotional directness at a cerebral level. Here's where we push to escape agendas, both sexual and poetic. In "The Little Engine’s Death" she wonders, “am I hiding in the shotgun’s sexual agenda?” King is not afraid of feelings. And I can't help but think back to her essay on exclusion in today's poetry world when I read a line like this from "My Singularity is Self-Inflicted,"

Tonight I am in the museum of my life, and you have an inflated sense of signature.

And we're back to realism in a poem like "Your Heart, The Weight of Art, " which reminded me of Neruda:

Sometimes I see what isn’t there, and that includes Love,
as if some parlor trick is inherited from my great grandmother
of the mythical Cherokee variety. But she was no soothsayer, and I’m
            just alone
now, with the life that is in you calling mine out.

There's subversiveness around what makes us feel. From the poem "One Bird Behind One Bird:"

Too bad about the plate, the shadowbox, the twisted book.
The universe conspired, a felony against your face
in search of the tiny light that carves such things,
a grand piano to play, a poor painting by Paul Stanley
resembling the way I feel instead,

I also like "Drive By and Understanding the Poem" as a meditation on language and poetry, literally poetry as place and place as a congregation of those who wield power in Poetry.

 The poem’s also a handshake.

Her topics are also very up-to-date: guns, Baltimore, Muslims, gender identity, the Internet, (I always appreciate good capitalization on the word Internet), the Cloud, Americanness.

These poems are not solely games and juxtapositions. This is the difference between random and almost random. It takes more dexterity and I feel like there's just a smarter head behind it.

We are all cross-dressing
in tiny wings with the machines of bones to go on.

Lifeboat by Kristine Ong Muslim

I was sent a review copy of this book. Right away, I was fascinated by the beautiful and evocative cover design. This is a well-made book. Good fonts, good paper. 

And I enjoyed this book. It’s the type of part-surreal, part-haunted type of poetry I tend to like. Lovely word constructions and almost-but-not-quite rational meanings tipping slightly out of reach. The book is divided into many small sections that, for the most part, play as small little harrowing journeys. Ghosts ripple throughout the book. The obscure poem titles feel very painterly. The poems themselves have surface tension. Subjects ooze with darkness, bone  and flesh. The word lifeboat floats through many of the pieces throughout the book. An other-worldliness of death has been created. The pieces are full of loneliness and suffering with often cryptic meanings but still enjoyable (after all, bleak is beautiful). Big concepts are drawn in particular ways that feel almost, but not fully, recognizable. These poems are enigmatic, wandering souls.

This line from one of the poems: "Your daily search for catacombs will end on your front door” immediately reminded me of the current One Story short story named "Catacombs" by Jason Zencka where a preteen boy goes missing in Acapulco and his  younger brother suffers through issues of memory, guilt and a spiritual search for redemption in the catacombs of cities around the world.

As an aside, I really enjoy One Story. If a barometer on literary journals is how excited you get when they arrive in the mail, One Story would be my favorite. I have to admit, I never got excited over Poetry's arrival. The bad thing about One Story is how hard it is to get the darn thing. Both of my subscriptions have necessitated emails after months of not getting any issues. The first year there was some odd subscription snafu after my free trial ended and I had actually paid for it. This year, the publishers seemed to be on hiatus while they redesigned themselves. No emails, no heads-up, no setting expectations, no welcome back. If you can deal with these kinds of aggravations, (which are quite unique in the magazine subscription world), there’s much to recommend in their selections.

But back to the poems. Here are some examples:

The Grasp

The little girl tells us
about her hands
and what they cannot do:

“This is how you hold
a thing in your hand
so it will not want
to be let go.”

Then she shows us
her empty palm.

The opening line of "Preface to a Pornographer’s Dirty Book" is also indicative of how almost-sensical the poems can be:

“Love is foreplay waiting to happen”

Her poem “Steady Guide” begins with

“The senseless steering that has led you to believe that all skies are created equal.”

and ends with:

“And just like that bakery boy guzzling sugar when our backs are turned, you make sure that nobody sees you hunched like that, that nobody sees you in pain.”

Surely that must remind you of somebody. This is how it felt reading the whole book.

For more poems and some video adaptations.

I’ve always been attracted to cerebral poets, or rather a particular niche of them, the ones who explore a certain level of academic fiction and non-fiction. Specifically the David Foster Wallace level: not so genius you can’t follow them but pretty freakin’ smart and well read.

There's a line of complexity beyond which my brain starts to frizz. Conspicuous allusions also breaks my mind. Not that David Foster Wallace doesn't allude. I guess I'm just partial to modern, hip as opposed to Greek and Latin ones, Shakespeare-staling or the backwards-circular allusions to the already painfully allusive T. S. Eliot. I actually like T.S. Elliot just more his haunted, creepy allusions more than the "learned" riff-raff.

The exception is Anne Carson who definitely alludes to the classics but leaves enough in there for some of us dummies out here. I like her language. And that's what it comes down to for most of us–language that appeals to us, to our unique ears and ways of thinking.  Below is my cocktail for smarty-pants poets, the ones I keep coming back to.

In my third or fourth poetry writing workshop at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, my professor Steve Schreiner gave me my first personalized book recommendation (like ever), the book Powers of Congress (1990) by Alice Futon. This was back in the mid-1990s and I found it impenetrable back then. Twenty-five years later (and seven cities later) I got back to reading it.

What I love about Fulton is that there is hardly a dead line in any of her poems. Her poems are eclectic and range in topics from technology to courtship to soap operas. And, best of all, she’s smart about science. As Sarah Howe said in her Paris Review essay "On Relativity," both science and poetry share the need to construct metaphors in order to explain our phenomena and both disciplines are "conscious of how these metaphors can mislead."

I also appreciate the level to which Fulton takes her experiments. She plays with the lyric but only parts of it or one aspect of it. Because of this her point is never lost in abstraction. A good example of this is “Point of Purchase,” a lyric with marginalia from different student characters participating in a writing workshop. The marginalia is funny and naively off-the-mark, workshop comments that are self-involved and prime with agendas.

Another favorite is “The Fractal Lanes” which circles around science and (of course) fractals, but also hints at bowling and writing in a subtle ars poetica. Who knew a few years later I would become interested in fractals and chaos theory myself when working on Why Photographers Commit Suicide.

"Losing heart, mind, or being
Insinuated."

Great lines from the poem “Silencer”

“To live is to be a threshold that persists.”

Or from “Losing It”

"When your brain’s become a byzantine cathedral
Flooded with the stuff of sump and dumpster.
Its frescoes—memories—confetti
into the mortal sludge."

My least favorite poems in the collection are probably the love/sex poems, which seem more convoluted and remind me, for some reason, or Erica Jong’s idea of the Zipless Fuck.

You get your money’s worth with Fulton, this book running over 100 pages.

Much of the same praise can be given Albert Goldbarth and his books. I finally finished the 185 page set To Be Read in 500 Years (2009). Here’s another poet of good quality and quantity for dollar spent. Even more so than Fulton, Goldbarth swims in ideas of science and cosmology and current culture, marriage, fame, product placement, identity theft, history, the Internet, illness. He also references Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman. One example from “I’m Nobody! Who Are You? Are You Nobody, Too?”

"The three, the wind: a fricative relationship.
A sound so shaped that some nights
it’s less music and more language.
Words. A few words, anyway. There
have been nights, admit it, when
you’ve thought you heard your name in the air,
your name being sung, a recognition
that you’re part of the star-resplendent sky
and the must vapors of earth—they
know who you are, you owe them for this special focus.
Listen: your name; a part
of the wind’s acoustical graffiti."

Like Fulton, Goldbarth also experiments but sets his limit. He experiments with stanza arrangements like Fulton and cross-outs and titles. He works out language theory issues but by talking through them. He’s always inclusive.

His micro and long poems consistently make me pause and say, Wow! The poem “Imperfect Knowledge” is an amazing thing. Channeling modernism's crisis of knowing, it references William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman and Bette Midler. Part of the lyric in the shape of a face while discussing prosopagnosia.

“…a museum, of sorts, for errors” is also a great multi-sectioned poem about bad ideas and blunders. “The Blank” is a great mid-sized poem about literary controversy, among other things. It’s hard to say what Goldbarth poems are about when they ramble luxuriously.

Here's an example of a tiny ars poetica called “Birds,”

"It’s hunger and territory
although we choose to call it song."

He’s also very funny. From “The Voices,”

“My mother worked in condemning.” Well whose
doesn’t. “No, I mean that was really her job,
condemning vacant buildings for the county.”

Jorie Graham's book The Dream of the Unified Field (1995) is a collection I’ve also had since the late 1990s and have finally finished, (it’s signed no less; I bought it at a Jorie Graham reading). Graham, although a more "difficult poet" is not dissimilar to Fulton and Goldbarth. She tackles the elusive way the universe works, she talks of hooks and currents and ghosts. But at times she can be cryptically Dickinsonian and she can also invoke biblical and classical allusions. She uses quick cutting transitions, and more often challenges knowledge instabilities.

She goes a little farther in her willingness to let gaps come between her and her readers (from “One in the Hand” – “And see how beautiful/an alphabet becomes/when randomness sets in.”) She goes farther into the project of abstraction (from “Mind” “the unrelenting, syncopated/mind”). And she’s also awfully more serious (from “Tennessee June” “Nothing is heavier than its spirit”).

But she’s abstract in the right recipe with the naturally particular.

From “The Visible World”

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface
                                 Breaks
into shingled, grassed clustered; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
Maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters…A series of successive single instances…
Frames of reference moving…
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
Bacterial, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged
                                and rippling
mosses. What heat is this in me
that would thaw time, making bits of instance
                                overlap
shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through
                                this culture
slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,
                                opportunities
taken?

Last October, near Halloween, I had the opportunity to attend a reading of the poetry faculty at Central New Mexico Community College. The event was called “Faculty in Berets” and aside from the clichéd and hoaky title, it was one of the best lit readings I’ve been to in New Mexico these last five years.And because the college is a community college, (I guess), their bookstore doesn’t carry any faculty books. There also weren’t any books available at the reading. But at least I was able to track down some online.

When Felecia Catron Garcia read from her book Say That (2013), she talked about how well suited her poems were to Halloween–being, as they were, so full of ghosts. Her book is haunted by not only ghosts but domestic violence (From the poem "Whirlaway" — “To think I will have to live through this”) and death, so much death that “death is weary of me.” The book also explores Catholicism, surreal dreams, inertia, motherhood and its moment of impatience, (a most sober look at parenthood), some of the best in traumatic love poems: dangerous love, absurd love, love from the dead.

From “Territorial Jockeying”

"Because I love you, I have given up on the idea of love.”

From “Dreams of the Dead”

"Take off
your shoes and lie on his grave. Tell him
I live in this world and no other.
Put on your shoes. Don’t look back."

All throughout the book I enjoyed her titles that referred to the poems but didn't retell them or pre-tell them. There's a great archaeology poem called “El Mozote, El Salvador, 1992:”

"We are here to discover what happened then,
but I want to know what happens now.
That gray sky is a stroke of luck. My fingers
Clutch the small hand bones of children."

After all the harrowing but honest parenting poems (“Four Gifts,” “Weaning”), the namesake poem, “Say That,” is a beautiful relief, both a play on a lie told to a child about their birth story and some suggestive, creative alternatives to the birth story.

Rebecca Aronson’s Creature, Creature (2007) contains poems that bounce between New Mexico and the Midwest in Kansas and Missouri (the flat parts) and had lines I especially appreciated (having lived in the Midwest) like “There are shadows from nothing but ourselves.”

There are little moments of ritual and religious artifact in the book, a wonderful ode to pepper, a very visceral poem about oranges and body spheres called “Navel & Blood.” The poem “After Surgery” deals with the loopy state of moving through hospital rooms drugged.

Aronson works in parataxis or juxtapositions in many poems and some experimental prose. “Diary of Light” was a favorite experiment which ends “Enter through your own shirt. Try to be your best self.”

She does the elusive Midwestern prairie poem well. "West" is a good poem about prairies, insects and "whatever moves.”Or  from the poem "Crossing" the first line: “I’m driving home, one eye on Iowa.”

“In the Field” starts with “Where cows graze" and ends with

“who
tipped his hat, later introduced
as your mother’s favorite
neighbor at the market where
he shook your hand
a long time.”

“What If” is an example of an experiment I like. Parataxis that builds to something and  “4 am, Sitting in the Dark” and “Echo” would each make a great meditation poem. 

I've been very overdue on covering some of the books I read last year. I have a short little stack taunting me in my office. I didn’t want to just file them away (keep or garage sale?) until I mentioned them in some way.

One of the good things about contest submissions and their fees of late is that some publishers will now send you free books or subscriptions to their magazines as compensation for your submission fee. This is how I got the following two books:

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone by Lisa Olstein, 2006

This book was one of my favorite books of poetry last year. Olstein makes a steady study of perception, border zones, edges, fences, ("a crackling on the radio moving into silence) and she does so with graceful particularness and narrative experimentation. She studies tipping points, sleep’s edge (in the same way Proust explored it), wind shifts, the cusp of change, “the tensile strength of the moment.” Often she does this by weaving ethereal narratives together into poems that become slightly haunting.

From "Dear On Absent This Long While"

"Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods."

When I made it half-way through, my notes say I was getting fatigued of exploring this idea. But then amazingly there were great poems after that, like the long poem "Guide to Self Hypnosis," "Parable of Grief" and "Metaphor Will Get You Everywhere."

This is a book however where the titles seem unrelated to the poems.

I usually like books by nuns and monks. So I was primed to like Spectural Waves by Madeline Defrees, 2006.

However, I didn't. The poems try way too hard to be smart and you find yourself in a tangle of obscure, italicized references. She’s also too conversational for my taste.

An example from "The Visionary Under the Knife"

"…The needle stops. The doctor

inserts a foldable silicone lens, courtesy of
Bausch & Lomb. The surgeon
checks the wound for leaks."

The language feels flat as opposed to simple and the line breaks don’t seem very interesting. Also, the day-to-day content didn’t draw out anything spiritually or philosophically relevant. There were no lessons of language. She seemed to have the confidence of knowing without searching.Toward the end of the book there is a crown of sonnets about Elvis. Since I love sonnet crowns and pop culture poems, I felt sure to like this, but again I didn’t.

The Academy of American Poets sends members a book every year, the winner of the Walt Whitman Award. For 2015 it was the same-different by Hannah Sanghee Park. Rae Armantrout was the judge which gives you a hint that this book might end up being the same-different language type fun.

For a sample of these language experiments, the first few poems are titled “Another Truth” “And a Lie” “One Truth” “And a Lie.”

From the end of "T/F"

“ This statement is false.
This falsity true.”

Poems are word play and etymology fun although some of it's make-believe etymology. There are playful, lazy hearings and cliché weaves, folk tale riffs, muses on the jackalope. I have to say her endings always feel good but I didn’t check a single poem to re-read later.

The book is oddly designed, too. Only every other page had page numbers printed like this “22/23.” I guess it’s the same different as well.

I went to Flagstaff last summer as part of a big family trip across northern Arizona where my father grew up. We visited Canyon de Chelly, Hopi, the Grand Canyon, Flagstaff and La Posada, the Harvey House in Winslow. Since my brother and sister-in-law like to visit college bookstores for t-shirts and I like to visit them for books of local poets who teach there, we squeezed in a visit to Northern Arizona University's bookstore. I only found one local author there but I did find a copy of their local literary journal called Thin Air.

This Noisy Egg by Nicole Walker, 2010

I did have trouble getting started with this book, something seemed off with the rhythm and line breaks and free association. I couldn’t tell if her line breaks were for look, sound,  or meaning. Many feel like they could have easily been written as prose.

But there were poems in here I loved: the list poem “A Number of Things are Scarily Lacking.” This poem illustrates for me how parataxis really works, juxtapositions of content forced into poetry lines is getting old when what we're dealing with are essentially lists of poetic phrases.

From "Mammoth"

“…We can all climb on, ride him up and down 101–
a whole country riding on the back of some awakened DNA, hanging
onto the bucking strands of a mappable–believable—dawn.

Other poems did rise to greatness, like “As if a fact”

“The world, revised is beige not turquoise.
That is easier to swallow.”

I really enjoyed her long poem, “The unlikely Origin of Species” and “Nor do I know the ways of birds clearly” with:

It wasn’t premonition, just air
blown in from chaos, powerless as prayer.”

The lit journal Thin Air was so enjoyable its made me want to add college lit journals to my list of college bookstore scavenging. I would peruse this journal further although the layout was clunky.  The short stories I enjoyed were “Meta-fictional Pasta” by Jaqueline Doyle and "Xerxes" by Andrew Bourelle. And I liked more of the poems in here than I do in most literary journals, student or professional.

"Birdwatching for Beginners" by Mark DeCarteret, the set of Frida Kahlo poems by Robin Silbergleid, "A Small, Graceless Sound" and "To the Woman Who Died After Being Electrocuted While Crossing a Las Vegas Street" by Chloe Warden, "An Observation at the Conjunction of Black Holes and Cricket" by George Korolog, "Goldfish" by Esteban Rodriguez, and "I Knew" by Ross Losapio.

This is a better than average college lit rag. Check them out: http://thinairmagazine.org/

The eBook is available for a limited time free on Smashwords and is available on all your reading devices!

Writing in the Age of Narcissism traces how the narcissism epidemic affects writers, including our gestures of post-modernism and irony, and proposes an alternative way to be a more positive writer, critic and reader.

I read a big stack of poetry this summer and I wanted to talk about all of them but I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the stack. It's so big, actually, that themes stared to emerge. I decided to talk about two or three books at a time in what I’m calling poetry cocktails.

For over a decade I’ve had three women poets in my to-do stack, three women I've always confused with each other because the only thing I knew about them was that they were all commonly referenced by fellow female students at Sarah Lawrence College back in the 1990s. And if we were talking about Louise Glück, I’d always confuse her with Marilyn Hacker who I would always confuse with Maxine Kumin. I had the same face for all of them.

This month I decided to read three of their books and straighten myself out. And wow, these women couldn’t possibly be three more different as poets, women and thinkers. What a treat to unsort this knot.

I started with Louise Glück’s 2001 book, The Seven Ages. I think my friend Ann sent me this book almost ten years ago.

As Glück’s professional, elegant photo sessions always show, she is  beautiful, elegant, feminine and very New-York-City-smart looking. Daughter of the X-Acto knife inventor, she attended but did not graduate from both Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.

The poems in this book cover frustrated love, betrayal, and childhood. Her poems appear as parables, fables and idea-based lyrics on existence. Her love universe is passionate but frustrated, somewhat withheld. Possession of the earth reoccurs. She’s very direct.

From her poem “Solstice”

“Why should we be forced to remember:
it is in our blood, this knowledge.
Shortness of the days; darkness, coldness in winter.
It is in our blood and bones; it is in our history.
It takes a genius to forget these things.”

From the poem “Stars”

“Only (softly, fiercely)
the stars shining. Here,
in the room, the bedroom.
Saying I was brave, I resisted,
I set myself on fire."

Poem the poem “Memoir”

“And if when I wrote I said only a few words
it was because time always seemed to me short
as though it could only be stripped away
at any moment.”

When I looked up Marilyn Hacker, Amazon immediately compared her to Adrienne Rich, I guess because they are both iconic lesbian poets. But I feel I connect with Hacker much more. To me, she seems much more to the point, even if she is talking around the point. I’ve always found Rich to be somewhat impenetrable and obscure. Hacker is from another area of New York City than Glück is, the Bronx not Manhattan. She graduated from NYU and her parents were Jewish immigrants. I have a signed copy of her book, Winter Numbers, from 1994. I was at Sarah Lawrence College at that time so either she visited SLC or I attended one of her NYC readings. 

I have to say this: I hated the format of the book (published by Norton). The top margins are too crowded and I felt the font size was too big. it felt claustrophobic. If you look at Hacker’s catalog of books with Norton on Google Images, you’ll see that the covers are all formatted the same way, like old MCA  greatest hits albums of the 1970s.

Hacker, like Glück, tells fables and  fairy tales, which was very popular (and effective) with second wave feminist writers, (see Anne Sexton’s famous “Cinderella” poem). Hacker also approaches her topics very directly with the plain-spoken language of a lived life.

From her poem “Against Elegies”

“For every partisan
there are a million gratuitous
deaths from hunger, all-American
mass murders, small wars,
the old diseases and the new.

Who dies well? The privilege
of asking doesn’t have to do with age.
For most of us
no question what our deaths, our lives, mean.
At the end, Catherine will know what she knew,
and James will, and Melvin,
and I, in no one’s stories, as we are.”

Her poems are full of great rhythms and she excels in writing interesting, unstuffy forms: pantoums,  crowns of sonnets, (I love me some sonnet crowns!), villanelles, crowded couplets. In the 1990s, everyone on the East Coast seemed to be writing travel poems. I heard so many affected travel poems at Sarah Lawrence, I was inspired to spoof them, which was the early impetus for the Mars poems that became my Sarah Lawrence thesis and later book, Why Photographers Commit Suicide. Hacker could easily have been one of those poets. She includes many European travel poems in this book, (a series of “Street Scenes”), and also includes poems about her Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. The final long poem is about her experience with breast cancer, “Cancer Winter.”

“Groves of Academe” is a great poem about her students who don’t read poems.

Hacker's love poems also contain disappointment but less from a perspective of loneliness and reservation. “Letter to a wound” and “Letter on June 15” are great examples. In “Nearly a Valediction” she says:

“You happened to me. I was happened to

…

You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.”

Her poem’s titles are vaguely porous, academic and unfulfilled. The poems themselves are much more conversational than their stilted titles. This didn’t appear to be happening ironically.

My Maxine Kumin book, Looking for Luck, from 1992 was also inscribed so I must have seen her read too. This was the last book I read of the three and Kumin seemed to exist somewhere between Glück and Hacker. Kumin is also the daughter of Jewish parents like Hacker but attended Catholic grade school. She's a heterosexual poet but nontraditionally feminine like Glück. Kumin spent much of her career in New England and like Hacker, Kumin is deft in the use of forms.

Kumin’s poems offer much more of a tone of greatfulness than the other two. Her topics in this book cover farm critters including horses and rats, gardening and, yes, foreign travel poems, although hers are in Bangkok. In the bulk of the book Kumin takes on the vocabulary of the farm and its many jobs. She also talks about teaching poems to prisoners, nature and  traveling across America.

In “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” Kumin equates the nursing of a horse to the nursing of a poem, both by using indirection to get the job done.

In another poem about poetry, she says:

“The boggy hollow is dark and perilous,
Sometimes language impedes, sometimes it helps.”

In the poem “Hay” Kumin covers hay farming and milking cows. 

“Allegiance to the land is tenderness.
The luck of two good cuttings in this climate.
Now clean down to the alders in the swale,
the fields begin an autumn flush of growth,
the steady work of setting roots, and then
as in a long exhale, go dormant.”

Like Hacker and Glück, her poems don’t finish off in a flourish of wisdom. She’s more practical than even those two lyric plain speakers.

The poem “On Visiting Flannery O’Connor’s Grave” deals with how unceremoniously O’Connor is treated at her grave site.  “The Poet’s Garden” delineates a brief history of American Poetry. The poem “A Brief History of Passion” weaves the love story of her parents with romances happening simultaneously in literary history among D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Of the three books, I had only read the Kumin's previously and it contained marginalia written in very slight (and retrospectively annoying) pencil marks. Why did I underline what I underlined decades ago. What I chose to highlight recently never did match up to what I was connecting to back then. That marginalia writer seems a stranger to me now. But that stranger was in fact me. Do we even connect at all?