Poetry

The Widow’s Crayon Box, Poems by Molly Peacock ff

The Anna Karenina principle might have merit, that all happy families are alike, but when one member dies, say one member of a marriage, the similarity, along with some of the happiness, passes through a prism and splits into an array of variation.  I became a widow a few months after Molly and I find her idea/metaphor of the mammoth crayon box to be a gift. So much distress is caused by the feeling that our grief must conform to some preordained chain.  Ideas on the stages of grief abound and give people who have enough to feel and process the additional, and crazy, notion that there is one right way to grieve.  With this book of poems, the full spectrum of color is at our disposal. 

Along with color, water is an image that dominates the work – swimming in…

The Matrix, Poems: 1960-1970 by N. H. Pritchard ff. When I first came to Friends Seminary, Norman Pritchard was Poet in Residence. I don’t know of anyone else who ever served in that capacity. He floated about the school in a long white robe; I thought of him earlier this year when I passed through Doha, Qatar, where many were similarly clad.

There is a Wikipedia article on him, and I was sad to learn that he died in 1996, in his fifties. This book is briefly discussed there as the “only one-man collection of visual poetry. . .ever commercially published.” (Robert Kostelanetz) This is poetry which does not survive a French explication de texte. It consists of deconstructed language, flights of whimsey, and blank pages.

Here are two poems from this collection: the first is entitled PEACE and the second called OLOGY.PEACErepeats the letters of the word over and…

Diamonds, Poems by Camille Guthrie ff. With Diamonds, Camille Guthrie lets her hair down. If Mrs. Maisel and T.S. Eliot had a love child, it would be Diamonds. I laughed my way through many of these poems but still took care to keep my iPad handy. After all, there was plenty to check up on: Picts, Sei Shōnagun, a host of erudite references as well as images of the abundant paintings and sculptures embedded in the poetry, providing us with glimpses of other times, and a new perspective on our own times. Real life is the subject. But here real life is comprehensive -- it includes the mortgage, the kids, the imagination (why shouldn’t she poet beat out Fanny for Keats – after all she could offer antibiotics), Madame Du Barry, all the paintings in the Clark Art Institute, unfinished novels, Syrian missing children, sex, and love.

One image I…

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…