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white and black bird flying

Jane Alynn, NECESSITY OF FLIGHT

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NECESSITY OF FLIGHT, Jane Alynn, Cherry Grove Collections, 2011.

As planned, I am spending my April reading poetry, though some mornings a blogpost feels out of reach. This book, not new, but a fairly recent addition to my book hoard, is one I definitely want to share.

Necessity of Flight is a showcase for its author’s craft. Jane Alynn is also a photographer (see her website for a sampling), and these poems are filled with images and light. To quote the back cover blurb from Lana Hechtman Ayers, at the heart of this book is “a profound reverence for and kinship with the natural world.”

I heard Jane read at Edmonds Bookshop about a year ago, and I can still hear her reading this poem:

In Want of Wings

The trumpeter swans are standing in the field
alongside the road. White, outsized, magnificent.
Suddenly, agitated by something, these birds take off
running, their bodies remembering the risk to living
in the open. The mass as it moves for flight stops all song.
The swans face the wind with wide-stretched wings,
arcs of luminosity, lifting their heavy bodies skyward.
Filled with awe, I watch them
until I am looking only at the distance.
And I think of things that make us disappear,
what harm the fowlers do. When I have wanted
wings. A child launched into darkness dreams
of human flight not forbidden, being borne
swiftly on a rush of wind, those miraculous pinions
in perfect rhythm of progression, blood feeding feathers,
wings pumping, breastbone heaving, breathing
easier when she comes to a sweet end,
having brought herself from the brink of extinction.

—Jane Alynn

Necessity of Flight is alive with wings, “cloudburst / of starlings”; hummingbirds “keen on honeysuckle”; “feathered beggars”; a gull, “dull and brassy and fat / as a wallet on payday, / swelled with longing.” Dreams and memories are longing, too, and almost fly, long-deceased loved ones passing through, and everywhere the rising of the poet’s words from line to line and page to page.

You can visit Alynn’s website to learn more. It’s worth the trip.

The Autobiography of Rain

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RAIN, Lana Hechtman Ayers. Fernwood Press, 2024.

Lana Hechtman Ayers is a one-woman poetry dynamo. She is the managing editor of three Pacific Northwest poetry presses: MoonPath Press, Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, and World Enough Writers. She also leads generative workshops, helps people assemble their books of poems, teaches at conferences, and writes her own poetry. To borrow the phrasing from the end of her poem, “A Blue True Dream,” her writing mantra must be “yes and yes and / illimitably yes.”  

In The Autobiography of Rain, her eleventh and most recent collection of poems, rain patters, welcome, relieving. “The rain is my best friend,” she writes in “Nineteen Things No One Knows about Me (And One They Do)”: “She knows how to keep a secret / and wash away the evidence.” Humor, sometimes, but rain also shows up hand-in-hand with grief. In “Landscape in Dreams”:

Where is it you go
when I lose sight of you in fog?
I’m certain I’ve seen you in dreams
that smell of burnt toast
On rainy days your laughter chimes
raindrops against roof gutter (27)

Oliver de la Paz uses these words to praise the book: “The fickle and atmospheric weather of losses, revelations, and heartbreak shifts and shimmers.” In poems such as “Reasons to Live,” and “On the Nature of Grief,” I was reminded that indeed this is poetry that “shifts and shimmers,”  that encompasses, becomes a voice talking back to you on a suicide hotline, sits beside you, faithful as a loved dog.

But these poems can also provide a nudge out of yourself, a gentle push toward something brighter.

“Poetry reveals there is no empty space”

—Hafiz

Out of the void: dishes, dust, screens, fire fight, firefly
glimpses, tipsy kisses, too little, too much, lingering
rosemary, cups of coffee, bitterness of heartbreak, guitar
chords from the basement, implicit threat, green rage,
Stevie Wonder, Beethoven, Janis Joplin, the Kosciuszko
Bridge, windows open wide, something unforgivable,
traffic, too hot, too cold, weight squarely in my body,
wooden spoon, stream, salt of grief, loneliness, barking
dog, pearls, pencils, hand stirring the pot, books, wind,
rain furrows, moonrise, alchemy, edgelessness, yawns.
It was a Monday.

—Lana Hechtman Ayers

You can learn more about the author at her website (and you should!): https://lanaayers.com/index2.htm

The Autobiography of Rain is available at Fernwood Press, or can be ordered at Bookshop.org.

 

 

Patricia Fargnoli (1937-2021)

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WINTER, Patricia Fargnoli. Hobblebush Books, Brookline, NH, 2013, 88 pages, $18, paper, https://www.hobblebush.com.

When MoonPath’s Lana Hechtman Ayres told me Patricia Fargnoli had been her teacher and mentor, I went looking for her. Winter, the sixth volume in the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, was the first to arrive, and is now on sale for $9 at Hobblebush Books (use this link: https://www.hobblebush.com/product-page/winter).

I have fallen hard for this book, and this poet. In “The Horse,” she begins:

I let the horse into my apartment,
pushed back chairs,
shoved the rattan chest
up against the tall bookcases…

Horses abound in this book. What’s not to love?

In addition to any other praise I might dish out, it’s a perfect book to read on a cold and rainy January day. Yes, New Hampshire, snow, but it works its spell here in the Pacific Northwest, too: “[I] found a sad music in the fork of an ash tree, / a music made of wind and the tuning forks of stars” (“Glosa”). As Meg Kearney tells us on the back cover, Fargnoli has “listened deeply to the silence of winter.”

Many of the poems in Winter are about dreams. A line from “Beginning of Winter—A Sijo Sequence”: “Last night in the dream I was hungry, but there was no food.” Or the ending of “Letter to my Double”:

Your dreams tell you what you want:
a man’s arms around your body, a safe place near water,
a bus that arrives on time to carry you home.

She captures the mundane, that daily seemingly ordinary life that we all find ourselves up against, while lifting it above the ordinary. Home, here, is not just the physical place where you lie down at night. The following poem, too, is about an actual place (Ireland, which made me choose it), but it transports us into a dreamscape:

Galway

            after Tranströmer’s “Track”

Thousands of crows flew through the Irish dusk
toward the copse of dark plane trees not far from here,
between the university and the famous river,

as when memories wing in from your past
with their loud continuous cawing
and then move beyond you, you don’t know where.

Or as when someone dies and her spirit rises
to join the others who are leaving the world’s sadness
to find a resting place in the quiet night branches beyond you.

The crows streamed past the high clerestory windows.
Dusk. The small wood they entered. The silver river.

—Patricia Fargnoli (from Winter)

Notice how the crows are actual, but spur memories that “wing in from your past / with their loud continuous cawing.” Sorry, but I just want to gush on and on. I’ve been thinking (a lot) about how one gets the evanescent, the transcendent into one’s poems, and Fargnoli offers a master class.

When I was working on The Pear Tree, I often thought of something Priscilla Long says in her chapter, “Art and Elegy,” in Dancing with the Muse in Old Age:

“Is it too obvious to say that one advantage of growing old is to remain alive to the beauty and suffering of the world? To make an elegy is to express that beauty and that suffering.” —Priscilla Long

The elegy, the courage to elegize, is a strength of Fargnoli’s Winter.

To learn more about Patricia Fargnoli, visit her page at Hobblebush Books (“Read Sample” offers a PDF of the opening pages of Winter, including the informative table of contents and the first few poems). When I Googled her name I found several video recordings of “Winter’s Grace,” perhaps her best-known poem (which you can also find at https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=11037.html). Simply gorgeous.