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Take Heart by Molly Peacock ff “Dear Heart,” a poem toward the end of this collection begins “Heart, unlock yourself. Fibrillating wings/Undo your ungolding.” This heart, sealed away, cut off from life, is an emblem for the entire book and for the poet’s struggle to recover from a childhood of abuse and trauma. We learn that the lock is frozen by worry. “A knife/Please,” says the poet. Throughout the collection we see the poet scraping away the encapsulating rust, the “oxidized hysteria,” to release the heart, to let it experience the gamut of human emotion. The very first poem presents this quest for feeling even more dramatically: “I smashed myself/and found my heart/a cave ready to be lived in.” Take Heart uses autobiography as its raw material, from the horrific childhood, to the death of the abusive father, to young adult sexual encounters and meditations on anger and self-esteem, to a coming to terms with hate as a subset within the more encompassing category of love. After the shattering scenes of the young girl and the mad drunk father comes his death. A sonnet called “Unexpected Freedom” gently applauds finally getting “enough sun.” Usually it is the dead who rest in peace, but the poet turns this on its head. The final couplet (addressed to herself) announces “nourished just by the fact that you’re alive/in the aftermath and now you rest in peace.” Going on, though, is fraught with perils. In “That Leaf,” an extended metaphor where the self is compared to a leaf seemingly struggling to turn over and view the sky, success comes unexpectedly fast. The new perspective is emphasized by internal rhymes: change, rearranged, estranged. The leaf should be happy; it turned over. But the adjectives we find are “depleted, terrified.” Freedom (I’ve heard somewhere else) comes with fear and trembling. What I most admire in this work is the poet’s skill in making every word count. Anger and anxiety are common; how will a poet make them leap off the page? “Anger Sweetened” portrays angry words as grasshoppers. Once out of the mouth they seem too harsh and hurtful. So we coat them with cloying chocolate and then we eat them. The result comes in the couplet at the end where the word gag has a double meaning. We gag on the nauseating sweetness and we are gagged into silence, stifling our anger. No matter what the subject matter, it is art that pulls us into a work. In “A Simple Purchase” the poet buys flowers. The peony buds make her think of Baudelaire’s flowers of evil and then pull her into free-range musings on why God must be ugly. Here is the thought as I see it: God created man in His image. Peonies are not like man. Therefore they are not like God. He created flowers to make something beautiful and of course different from Himself. Ergo as those made in His image, we also have an impulse to create the beautiful. Only the poem is not a syllogism. It makes its case under the control of rhyme. Just to show you, here’s an excerpt, but in this case only the whole poem will do. “He must make beauty,/just as we hope/to change – and grope/toward form in our lives,/ even if only the rhymes /of our mistakes survive.” Here is an ars poetica that leaves you smiling.

Dependent States, The Child’s Part in Nineteenth Century Culture by Karen Sanchez-Eppler 70’s This work provides a close, scholarly look at the role of the child in the American culture in the 1800’s. Karen sees children as both assimilators of cultural norms (since they are dependent on adults) and as agents, having their own impact on culture. Using a wealth of material both published and unpublished-- diaries, poetry, daguerreotypes, temperance flyers, primers, and Sunday School texts – Karen documents this tension. She shows how conventional a child might be in writing about, say, grief, having assimilated social expectations; on the other hand, the frank utterances in children’s diaries and poems indicate an impulse toward originality. I think of The Emperor’s New Clothes. It is a child who has the fresh vision to observe what no one else will admit as the unclothed emperor goes by. The tension between the child as vessel and agent of culture is what interests Karen as she examines the contending forces every child must somehow navigate. In addition to these materials, Karen makes effective use of such major figures as Whitman and Emerson. Whitman’s poem “There was a child went forth every day” aptly introduces the child as a magical assimilator. And Emerson, having experienced the grief of the loss of a child, is a necessary voice in Karen’s discussion of the cultural norms of the era concerning mourning. Karen’s position that children occupy an important and neglected place in cultural history cannot be denied. Her method of searching out the documents written by children or created for their indoctrination has provided her (and us) a treasure trove of new information and a path forward for scholarship.

Buy Now Pay Later by Hillel Black late 40’s? I grew up in the forties when it was customary to save up for something if you wanted to buy it. Not that our parents were so virtuous; there was just no other way. By the time Hillel Black wrote this book, published in 1961, an explosion had occurred in the world of consumers. No more saving up! We had to have things right away whether we could afford them or not. The credit card, one of the chief detonators of this change, began in 1950. Hillel tells the story of Frank MacNamara, who went out to dinner, having carelessly left his wallet in his office. When it came time to pay, he was in for serious embarrassment. The next day he got together with some friends and formed the Diner’s Club – the first credit card. Credit cards are only part of the story. Merchants caught on to a great vehicle for profit – selling debt. Department stores, furniture stores, and most prominently car dealerships got into the business of selling on time. Often the amount paid in interest exceeded the cost of the merchandise. This could have been all right except that it became customary to conceal the true interest rate from the consumer by stating only the amount of the monthly payment. Sometimes a statement of the monthly interest rate obscured the actual annual interest rate. People found themselves over their heads; sometimes their only way out was suicide. Anti-usury laws often did more harm than good. Few could secure loans meeting the standards of reputable low-interest institutions. In such conditions, loan sharks got toe holds and then became major (and ruthless) players. I don’t know, but my guess is that credit is more firmly embedded in our way of doing business than it was sixty years ago. This book provides a picture of the amazing avarice in our species along with the very sad naiveté. Maybe Polonius’s much mocked platitude should actually be words to live by. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. If you are a lender, you risk losing your soul to greed. If you’re a borrower, you risk losing your shirt.