Margaret Newlin: Collected Poems

/5 Comments/in , /by

My life continues to be challenging, but though I’m not writing much, I find that reading and talking about other people’s poems is a solace.

Today I picked up Margaret Newlin’s Collected Poems, 1963-1985 (Ardis, Ann Arbor, 1986) , a book lent to me by a friend (and overdue to be returned.) When I googled Newlin, I learned that her earlier collected poems, The Snow Falls Upward, was a 1977 finalist for the National Book Award. Today, she is all but forgotten, with no presence at either the Academy of American Poets or Poetry Foundation. I wanted to do a blog post, just to put her name out there one more time.

Besides notices of The Snow Falls Upward, I found little more on-line than an obituary notice in a publication from Chester County, Pennsylvania. She was born in 1925, married Nicholas Newlin in 1956, taught English Literature at Washington College in Chestertown, MD, and had four sons. She died in 2005. Her poem, “Rain,” was included in Art and Love: an Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990).

I knew I wouldn’t have time to read the entire Collected so I decided, somewhat perversely, to read the longest section, “The Book of Mourning,” poems written after her husband’s death in 1976. Here’s one poem, where the poignancy is underscored by the hopeful continuing of life and love story at the end:

Two

It was to have been
The two of us
Stretching our hands to the fire
On winter nights like this,
The flakes crowding the windowpane
Like newborn souls.

We would sip whiskey or wine,
Thinking of our boys,
Each on a far-off whitened campus,
Missing them hugely of course,
Yet heady with ourselves once more alone.

Who knows? Inventive as a bride
I might have outdone myself with meals,
And then we’d talk or write or read.
A walk with the dogs through printless snow, perhaps,
Before we watched the blaze
Die down, your arm, in its tweed,
Hugging me close.
A cup of something hot….
Then bed.

Miles off, this blizzard night,
Our oldest son,
Wearing your English coat,
May even now be walking home
His sweet small girl,
His arm — your arm, my arm
Too — around her,
Holding her tight.

— Margaret Newlin

 

 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Something about Living

/0 Comments/in /by

SOMETHING ABOUT LIVING, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio, 2024, 81 pages, paper, $16.95, https://www.uakron.edu/uapress/.

Trying to keep this to a simple appreciation of a poem, and failing, especially with this startling and powerful collection.  Something about Living won the 2024 National Book Award, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha has a whole host of prizes behind her. To introduce her, I’ll borrow from the review at Publisher’s Weekly:

The brilliant third collection from Tuffaha (Kaan and Her Sisters), who is of Palestinian, Jordanian, and Syrian descent, evokes the weight of a homeland’s genocide, but is equally about the joys of heritage and the righteous pursuit of justice for one’s oppressed brothers and sisters. She eloquently captures the dichotomy of pain and comfort: “Be it a home;/ ancient breath and second/ letter of ancestry. Home of unripe figs// or of suffering?” In “Triptych,” Tuffaha alternates language from the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights with phrasing from an Israeli tourism ad (“No one belongs here more than you do”), highlighting the inherent disconnect between this welcoming attitude and the violent displacement of Palestinians from the region.

— Publisher’s Weekly

It’s a book you will want to hold in your hands. Some of it not in English, some poems sprawling or shattered across the page. Here’s one that runs down the left margin, but even so manages to be unconventional.

In Case of Emergency

M. K., 1938-2023

This is how you open the box
when I am no longer here.

One of these might be the combination:

1975
The year you were born

1967
The year we lost the rest of our country

1936
The year your grandmother swallowed her gold coins
to hide them from the soldiers

This is how you keep yourself
safe, keep parts

of yourself in different boxes.
Trust no one
with everything

1949
The year my father died

1979
The year the checkpoint taught you
The difference between your name and your passport

1999
The year the last of our olives were uprooted
and the wall obscured Jerusalem

This is how you know it will end:

When night falls the windows of the city
become mirrors, a key recalls
the shape of its doorway, the stones of this land
nestle in young hands.

— Lena Khalaf Tuffah

If you have been writing your own original poems for National Poetry Month, you might try this form — your life (or the life of someone, like M. K., to be commemorated) —  condensed into a series of landmark years and events.

To learn more about the author, begin with poetry.org, or visit her interview after winning the Washington State Book Award in 2017.

 

Elder Voices

/2 Comments/in , /by

ELDER VOICES: WISTFUL, WONDERING, WISE, Editors Marie Eaton, Carla Shafer, and Angela Boyle. Elder Voices Project, Bellingham, Washington.

This anthology collects poems and essays from elders living in Whatcom County, Washington. The launch featured six writers, ending with 100-year-old essayist, Maggie Weisberg, who charmed all of us by announcing, before reading “On Being Old,” that the 70- and 80-year-olds in the audience could be her children.

It’s a cornucopia of delights, calling forth memories of childhood and loved ones long gone, embracing the natural world of years back, and the natural world still left to us, looking forward to new adventures. These are not people taking up their rocking chairs. They’re still growing, changing, writing.

Age Is Relative

Still kicking at sixty-nine years old,
one year short of Dad’s death,
four years past older Sister’s passing,
peering toward Mom’s eight,
astonished by Aunt’s ninety-three,
and still searching for
some sort of meaning
after all these years.

— Nancy Kay Peterson

If I had to sum up the book in one word? “Celebration.”

Old Growth

When two old friends stand together
in the forest for six hundred years and
feel the rain prickle against their shredding
bark, feel the heat of the morning press
into their needles on sloping limbs, feel
their silent lives raised from the forest floor
in a flow of phloem and xylem, we pass by
mindful of their presence, as if we mattered
and they rose in service to us — their shade,
their fibers, even their core (where friendship
lives) — sawn through and framed to form
our rooms. Or, mindful of our significance
as less than theirs, walking beneath the canopy
we would kneel, learn the pattern
of their breathing, feel the rain
dampen our sweaters, absorb
the heat of enduring friendship.

— Carla Shafer

Chock-full of inspiration, it’s a project I hope to see duplicated elsewhere. You can find a copy at Village Books, located in Fairhaven, and on-line.

Susan Rich: Blue Atlas

/0 Comments/in , /by

I really would like to post 30 times about 30 different poets during National Poetry Month, but — let me admit up front — I’m lowering thresholds all over the place. Soon I’ll be lying inert in the doorway and you’ll have to step over me. But not today! Today, we get a poem from Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Susan Rich.

It’s a book that needs to come with a trigger warning — a young woman, a forced abortion. In the words of Diane Seuss the poems of Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press, 2024), “chart an expansive life which spins around an epicenter of loss,” and transform “anger into amber.”

The long poem “How did I love him — ” with lines like “West African highlife beat,” and “his baritone psalms, his siren pleas” — I just don’t know where to begin. I think of my young adult daughters, and my heart breaks.

But here’s one poem, from the section, “The Decision”:

Your Still Life Builds a Home Inside My Head

In the late afternoon we lose an f-stop
as light bleeds out of the bandaged sky

and like phantom detectives with wide-brimmed hats

we reexamine the compass, the passport,
the magnetized color of four o’clock air.

In this woman-made harbor, we rearrange

pipe stands and glass slides. We multitask wicker stands
where objects could topple at any time —

let them topple! 

Here in the land of deferred decisions,
a hand-painted garden ball reflects on a floating scroll.

In this alchemical mirror, in this ark of a studio —

built on instinct and breath, through windows
clouded and smeared,

under the sign of the light meter

I’ll meet you here. A bright space to hold inside my head,
an open country — another life still new.

— Susan Rich

It’s a book and a life “cracked open” (“Once Mother and Father Were Buried”), and the poems crack open the subject matter — Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop make appearances, as do images from pop culture, and the world of music. My introduction to Blue Atlas arrived via a Zoom with Olympia Poetry Network (OPN), and hearing Rich’s remarkable, memorable presentation made the book stick in my mind. I had to get my hands on it and read the poems for myself. Given the recent attack on Roe vs. Wade, I kept thinking of that oft-quoted passage from William Carlos Williams:

It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men [women! people!] die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

These are honest, difficult, and necessary poems. To paraphrase what Rich wrote about June Jordan in a recent Substack Post, These are poems we need right now.

You can learn more about the book at Red Hen Press: https://redhen.org/book/blue-atlas/.

Click THIS LINK to find Rich’s Substack (and information about Poets on the Coast), and here’s a “real” review of Blue Atlas from Tinderbox:

Review of Blue Atlas by Susan Rich