Kathleen Kirk

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ABCS OF WOMEN’S WORK, Kathleen Kirk. Red Bird Chapbooks, 1055 Agate St., Saint Paul, MN 55117, 2015, 52 pages, $12 paper, www.redbirdchapbooks.com.

What a delight to spend my morning with this book. It’s an abecedarian of poems, and a work of art itself, hand-sewn, a print of a needlework alphabet sampler on the cover. Several of the poems are ekphrastics (poems about works of art), beginning with “Annunciation,”  after the Botticelli painting. The poems continue through the alphabet — “Before I Can See,” “Cold in the House,” and so forth.

I was mightily tempted to share Kirk’s poem for Q (“Quinsy,” a two-page riff on Q words: “Quirky and antique,” “the dear quotidian”). But I think the poem that really has me dazzled is the last one. In addition to working in band names (such as Feist and Morphine), this poem itself is an abecedarian.  Look for the letters A-M down the left margin, and N-Z, up the right. What a hoot!

(XYZ) ABCs of Woman’s Work

John Sloane, A Woman’s Work (1912)

A woman’s work is better done with a jazz
background, I learned late in life. Hanging laundry
can be a breeze with the right music, and sex
doesn’t drag with a lush instrumental. How
easy now to polish the lav,
Feist on the boombox, or U2.
“Genteel euphemisms” aside, it’s hot
here in the kitchen, cooking with gas.
I am a realist, not a Realist with a capital “R.”
John Sloan can’t paint me as his Susie Q–
Kathleen, Poet with Dust Mop, 
leaning over the fire escape railing to shake it to
Morphine, “Early to Bed,” earbuds in.

My morning’s response was to write an A poem…but I think an abecedarian (A Waitress’s Alphabet?) is definitely in the works.

Maurice Harmon

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LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, Maurice Harmon. Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland, 2010, 105 pages, €12.00, www.salmonpoetry.com.

I blogged about Maurice Harmon‘s Love Is Not Enough in April 2018 (click on the link to go to that longer post). His 90th birthday is coming up fast, and though I can’t be in Dublin for the party, I thought rereading his book and sharing another poem would lessen the distance.

As I’m working on a poem of my own about walking, I wrote this stanza into my journal this morning —

I could make magic too.
But this is real, the old road part of me,
an artery strafed by rain, the bay
from Skerries to Clogherhead a seething cauldron.
I cycled this road to Streamstown,
the ditches filled with Queen Anne’s Lace,
hawthorn’s communion cloth,
the chestnut’s candlelabra,
the rowan’s offerings
beech canopies,
grasslands kings desired,
woods ringing with song,
sturdy stands.
My holy road, my pilgrim path, my royal way.

from “The North Road”

Love Is Not Enough includes a range of Harmon’s work, and he never flinches from the controversial (see his long poems about the Catholic Church, Irish politics, and academe). Harmon is a scholar-poet, and other books include a translation, The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland (2009) and the anthology, Irish Poetry After Yeats (1978, 1998). His more formal poems (rolling rhythms, unexpected rhyme) are my favorites.  This poem, for instance, which first appeared in The Last Regatta (2000):

Slow Learner

We lived so far from town I did
not go to school for years,
truant of woods and shore.

I knew the ways of birds,
could track the rabbit and the fox,
guarded the hens against the hawk.

When goats were born I raised
them as my own, when pups were drowned
I mourned, but loved the one we saved.

I got no marks at school for flinging sticks,
could neither read nor write, so late
to class the Catechism was my ABC.

Christ sat upon the mat. Morality was strange:
commandments, mysteries, big sins, little sins.
I was a rabbit trapped within the furze.

I reared away from priestly bit and ban.
I shied from sin. What I knew best
was climbing slowly through dreamy firs

until I hung above a swaying world,
could see the castle turning on its hill,
could feel the ocean roll toward Rockabill.

 

 

Robert M. Wallace

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HAWK ON A POWER LINE,  poems by Robert M. Wallace, Louisiana Literature Press, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, Louisiana 70402, 2015, 56 pages, $14.95, paper, http://www.louisianaliterature.org/

Robert M. Wallace’s book of poems, Hawk on a Power Line, was given to me for Christmas. This morning I reread it, cover-to-cover.

Wallace lives in West Virginia, a state of special interest to me as my grandparents moved from there to Washington state around 1910. Some of the poems might be expected, given the region–pickup trucks, coal and coal sheds, flooded creeks, even “Redneck Variations on a Theme by Wallace Stevens”–but over all, Wallace’s poems are rooted in the landscape, and take flight from it, like a hawk circling a field or sunlight reflected from a river. The poems are observant and often painterly, and as one reviewer noted, “unobtrusive.”

In the first poem in the book, the closing image arrests me. It also occurs to me that this poem suggests a starting place for my own poem today. Wallace imagines better names that “hawk.” What would I rename, if I could?

And to the Fowl of the Air

Adam had it all wrong
When he named the hawk.
Watching something that beautiful
Soar above me
Means much more
Than four small letters
Without even a long vowel
To make it sing.

Maybe it could have been thunder
Or pain?
What about indifference,
Power, or praise?
Think of saying,
Easy and clear
Praise circles a summer field.

Or even something so simple,
So honest like eye
With its rising vowel
Which in my heart now means
The hazel iris of curved wings.

NaPoWriMo — silly name for a serious undertaking

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National Poetry Writing Month is of course not silly at all. From some of what I’ve been reading lately — advice to “Shelter in Poems,” “Take Refuge in Poetry,” and so forth — poetry will save us.

Imagine the old bards, reciting poetry around a campfire.  Then go read the poems at Unbound: Poems of the Pandemic and tell me you don’t agree.

photograph by Loren Webster

As in Aprils past, I visited the blog of local poet and bookstore owner Chris Jarmick, to find out where NaPoWriMo might take me this year. And skipping from link to link, I found Maureen Thorson’s Napowrimo.net, and an invitation to write a bird poem (plus a link to this wonderful little riff on bird poems at Poetry.org: https://poets.org/text/thirteen-ways-looking-poems-about-birds).

For further inspiration (re: birds, especially), visit https://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/

So, the challenge is on. Day One: tomorrow!

What will you write?