THE MORE EXTRAVAGANT FEAST, Leah Naomi Green, Graywolf Press, 2020. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award, 2019, selected by Li-Young Lee.
Because I have skipped a couple Aprils of my poetry-book-a-day in celebration of National Poetry Month, there’s a huge stack of poetry books waiting for my close attention. Where do all these books come from? People send me books; I exchange books with poets at readings; I pick up books in my local bookstore and can’t bring myself to put them down again; on occasion, I deliberately choose a book by a poet I don’t know—curious about the poet, or about the press.
I see each book as a sort of debt incurred, and this month is an opportunity to pay back the poetry community for 
supporting me.
So, where or when did I pick up this book? I don’t remember! That it was selected by Li-Young Lee (a favorite poet of mine) for this prestigious award no doubt has much to do with my having it.
Waking Up the Bell
The poem is the slag heap,
and what I keep I keep.
The axe I did not make, the trees
do what I can’t: converting light
for when it’s gone. The fire
and the forges
call the metals back
like meteorites from orbit.
The ore is that which changes me,
extracts me from myself.
The iron tonsil of the bell
I neither wrought nor swung
cleaves hours into halves,
muscles to my bone.
It scores my weeks,
spills them
one at a time
in the lap of the ferrous valley.
We’ll break them open this way,
melt them back to days.
—Leah Naomi Green
Although the poems are not what I would call Whitmanesque, each section has an epigraph from Whitman, and, like Walt Whitman’s poems, these poems celebrate and sing the body. Stiff hip, whorl of an ear, “fingers and formed lung.” Some of my favorite poems in this collection are about pregnancy and childbirth. Other poems are about introducing a child to the world, about the death of grandparents, about eating and other kinds of caring that go into sustaining our bodies.
The tenderness and simplicity of these lines in “Week Twenty: Indulgences” threw me back to my own daughters’ early childhood:
Last night
her small clothes
hung on the line waiting,
and I loved them there
all night,
their drying
in the quiet.
High praise from the back cover:
“Time doesn’t move, we move,” says Tolstoy. And so we travel—inside our bodies, inside our days, our families. Leah Naomi Green’s calm, clear eye documents the essential, elemental music of this journey. —Ilya Kaminsky
The darkness and suffering of living on earth are assumed in this work, woven throughout the fabric of its lineated perceptions and insights, and yet, it is ultimately informed by the deep logic of compassion (is there a deeper human logic?) and enacts the wisdom of desire and fecundity reconciled with knowledge of death and boundedness. —Li-Young Lee
To write poems “informed by the deep logic of compassion” is a great goal.
You can learn more about Leah Naomi Green at her website, including how to purchase her book.
reminded of what a poem can do, what a poetry collection can do…”
