#my brain has been whirring ive forgotten how to write abt poetry since university but i tried my best!!!!

[cntarella]

Poetry Round-Up 2024, Pt. 2

It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Carol Bracho (2022) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️½

A collection of poems by a celebrated Mexican poet, on the subject of her mother and her struggle with Alzheimer's disease. These poems—divided into sections, perhaps to mimic the progression of the disease—reflect her mother's mental and physical decline, as well as the gradual "stages" of loss that they both experience. For Bracho's mother, that is the loss of her memories and cognizance; for Bracho, that is the loss of her mother. It's always nice when translated collections include the original text alongside the translation, which reveal certain things about the meter, rhyme, cadence, etc. of the original poem that might not have been carried over into another language. Bracho employs a lot of dream language in her poetry, a vagueness of imagery that works especially well with the themes of loss and grief, often feeling ungraspable as her mother steadily becomes incomprehensible to her. Eventually, this vagueness becomes all consuming, broken only by all too brief snatches of introspection—"How do you?"—that seem to reveal the keen mind obfuscated by dementia.

Winter Stranger by Jackson Holbert (2023) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A collection of poetry centered on grief, loss, and the heart of an American suburbia rife with violence, drugs, and death. Intermingling tenderness and brutality, Holbert's attempts at connection—to home, to memory, to loved ones—are constantly rebuffed by the constancy of loss, which comes like the seasons, year over year. And yet still one must cherish these moments ("A long life full of terror is still a long life.") because they are all we will ever have. This thread of sentimentality is stronger in the earlier poems of this collection, and by far my favorite; they felt personal, a microcosm of human tragedy that still manages to offer some catharsis through the sheer act of exhuming those feelings through writing. These poems are a small way of memorializing those sentimental moments against such institutional powers—drugs, mental illness, war—as one slogs, step by step, through a long and cold winter

Come the Slumberless To the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall (2020) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

There is something about Traci Brimhall's poetry that just leaves you breathless—it is intense, dense, deeply felt, and shows a real command of language and imagery. This collection of poetry is about a constellation of different subjects, with the recurring themes of grief (seem to be reading a lot of those these days), motherhood/parenthood/childhood, and one's relationship with the divine. The state of sleep and sleeplessness functions as an incredibly important conceit within this collection: prayers, lullabies, and wishes perform their utterative work (in the sense of a speech act) in this liminal, the Land of Nod, which reflect so much of our hopes and dreams in the waking world.

Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner's Pond, Skin Divers by Anne Michaels (2000) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

An omnibus of three separate collections written by Anne Michaels over the course of 15 years, this book of poems was an exceptional read! A lot of these poems remind me, stylistically, of Mary Oliver: the lyricism and imagery of the poems, which use nature as an avenue by which we can understand ourselves (and vice versa). Michaels writes a lot about love and its myriad of forms—platonic, romantic, parental, etc.—as it has shaped her life, and I loved getting to track the different registers of love through the evolution of these collections which were intended to speak to one another. For Michaels, love always seems to be punctuated by grief, tenderness outlined by the inevitability of loss and perhaps more precious for it—and also perhaps why winter has such prominence, more than other seasons, in her works. Skin Divers was probably my favorite collection out of the three. Some favorites that made me feel insane: - What the Light Reaches ["Prayer is the effort of wresting words/ not from silence,/ but from the noise of other words./ To penetrate heaven, we must reach/ what breaks in us."] - Words for the Body ["You spoke of a kind of hunger/ that makes pleasure perfect./ Then you said how it was to be opened/ and tasted by a hall full of people."] - The Weight of Oranges (the poem, not the whole collection though it was also very very good holistically) ["I hear your voice now—I know,/ everyone knows promises come from fear./ People don't live past each other,/ you're always here with me."]

Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido (2013) - ⭐️⭐️

Read on the recommendation of a trusted reviewer, but unfortunately did not work for me, which just goes to show how subjective poetry is. None of these poems are bad, per se, and some were even stylish—Lucie Brock-Broido has a good grasp of mood, and how the sound of certain words pile up on each other to feel almost suffocatingly dense ("Were I to wake, muffled through the balsam/ Woods, scent of myrrh and mineral.// Would that be tonight." & "In hospital how high the heat for amaryllis to push out from the furrow of its soil"). But that's about where my level of enjoyment of these poems ended. I did not really get on with how aphoristic some of these lines were—a collection of images that worked well in short poems but failed to connect to any bigger ideas in some of the longer ones. The menagerie of animal images in this collection (apes, egrets, doves, horses, lions, to name a few) were peppered in like curiosities but did not feel like they held any particular symbolic, thematic, or personal meaning to constitute anything "unifying" across these poems.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy (2006) - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ended my poetry year on a high note! Carol Ann Duffy's poetry is striking, sensual, and even playful—so many poets these days have abandoned form and rhyme in an effort to seem more serious, but Duffy shows that depth does not have to come at the expense of a little bit of whimsy. When she's not being a little silly, Duffy's poetry reads highly Romantic (in the sense of the movement rather than the adjective) with its highly symbolic use of natural imagery, its emphasis on passion and sentiment, and emotion overflowing to extreme or even excessive degrees ("Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,/ so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard" & "Falling in love is glamorous hell" & "For thousands of seconds we kiss; your hair/ like treasure on the ground"). If you love Percy Shelley or John Keats or Marina Tsvetaeva, there might be something in Carol Ann Duffy's poetry for you!