A Fox, A Hunger, A Graveyard
Sealey Challenge Days 9, 10 and 11: Merwin, DeColo, and Corwin
I have been busy with…life things. Taking a long drive up to Milwaukee to grab a few hours of visiting with my son. Preparing for a few days away. Catching up on yard work after a bout of back issues. But I have been reading, something I can do every afternoon or evening once all the necessary things are out of the way.
The Vixen by W.S. Merwin (1995, Knopf) has been on my shelf for quite some time, as my husband found a signed copy for me as a gift. Published in 1995, I vaguely remember a first reading where, although I appreciated the careful language grounded in the natural world, I struggled to relate to the poems, their little worlds without punctuation and full of reflection. Re-reading almost 30 years later, the poems hit hard. These are meditations on time and how it reclaims everything, how we are but a small part of what the earth holds.
from “Old Sound” - the house/ is another age in my mind it is old to me/ in ways I thought I knew but it goes on changing/ now its age is made of almost no time a sound/ that you have to get far away from before you hear it
from “Vixen: - when you are no longer anything/let me catch sight of you again going over the wall/and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures/guttering on a screen let my words find their own/places in the silence after the animals
from “ A Given Day” - one at a time I remember without understanding/an afternoon walking on a bridge thinking of a friend/when she was still alive while a door from a building/being demolished sailed down through the passing city/my mother half my age at a window long since removed/friends in the same rooms and the words dreaming between us/the eyes of animals upon me they are all here/in the clearness of the morning in the first light/that remembers its way now to the flowers of winter.
I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World by Kendra DeColo (2021, BOA Editions) took me in a completely different direction. These tough, funny, honest poems about living, mothering, and the power and danger of the body in a modern world. The poems are on the page, many with double white space between lines which creates a feeling of letting the reader live in one singular lines moment before barreling forward.
from “Crow Flying Overhead with a Hole in its Wings” - I googled what it means/ and read about parasites/ but nothing about whether it is/ a benediction/ to see an animal flying/ with this perfect portal in its wing/ through which I saw the sky/ through which its jeweled language/ leaked muted and streaky
from “Love Letter with the Beatles, Lana Del Ray, and Julio Cortázar”-I feel most like a mother/when I think of how lucky we are/and still resent/everything about you//Most like a mother/wanting to hide my big ass and thighs/wanting to celebrate my big ass and thighs/feeling it’s an accomplishment/to go out in public and let myself/be seen most like a mother/when the young barista spills my drink/and calls me ma’am/and doesn’t look at me
Marble Orchard by Emily Corwin (U of Akron, 2023) is a sectioned book of four different sequences of poems. The first section has poems dealing with mental health and medication that are titled as portrait poems, beginning “Lunatic as…” The second section features persona poems mostly inspired by female characters from television and film, mostly horror films. The third section called “wicked accident” is an experiment in found language from public eavesdropping, and the fourth section features ekphrastic poems.
There’s much formally and sonically to appreciate in this collection, and I enjoyed its willingness to experiment without distancing the reader.
from “A Brief Survey of My Soul” - vintage floral blouses/markers that bleed and don’t/dark rose, dusty rose lipsticks/cat fur, lost hair/lit candlewick, wax scented like apples/and a butane lighter
from “medication as beau presents” - III. alprazolm/amped up, I roll into prom/in a romper marled with loam/and opals. All around me/my pallor—they lop off my/molars, mop up the oral/gallons in my lap
from “After Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church (1862): - a smog that’s mauve and gossamer, splotched sulfur dioxide disaster. Then, grease, all against, there, a final cinder of the unstoked grate, dirty as a paint bucket. I blush, how it makes me heated to be near it—unwanted as a garish fur coat, too hot for now or ever. That horizon like a before and after.