The Garden of Verse: Confessions, Commentaries and Some Home Truths in Young Poems

My thoughts on some poems that speak truth and summon memory in the December issue of Verse-Virtual:

         "Botched Job" by Donna Reis employs the structural device of using the key words in the second line of a stanza to build the first line of next stanza. Along with rhyme and other kinds of repeats, the music of this poem blows like a chilly wind through the stages of a painful tale of a spouse's manipulative cry for attention. I can almost hear a sad Spanish guitar between the stanzas. A very affecting poem. 

        Poet Ceri Eagling watches the world in her "Reflections," a poem based on a Paris street scene:

Madame wields her shopping basket like a weapon
splitting the knots of Brits who picked the Sunday market
option over the Château on their visit to Versailles.

       In a back-handed tribute to her worldliness, those 'Brits' dismiss Madame's discourtesy as "a case of bloody Gallic cheek " -- one of those wonderfully tangy phrases that could only come from England's English. The sharp-eyed poet tells us that the tourists are

choosing that interpretation over "the craven
tribute paid to crabbed old age." I think I will remember that 'crabbed old age' and remind myself not to be crabby.

          In what we may safely call a confessional poem given its title "On the Drive Home from the Jolly Party a Young Mother Confesses," Donna Hilbert offers a riveting vignette with an enduring message. After the 'young mother' confesses the heavy consequences of "no sex education" on her thwarted ambitions, the men in the car turn to stone, and the car's other young mother reveals that "her candor scares me." Readers may meditate on whose confession is referenced by the title.

          Many of the poems in the December issue of Verse-Virtual connect to the theme of early works. It's hard to believe that many of these were written so young. Kate Sontag's evocative poem "Scenes from an Apartment in Hollywood (with Dogs)" tells

how the blue hour enters
through the balcony windows
like a silent screen hero
from across the boulevard
and slowly blackens for stars

          The poems captures the way certain experiences go so deeply when you're young. I still notice the 'blue hour' of fading light and blackening silhouettes as sunset fades to darkness, but I think those hours were even bluer back then.

           David Graham's "The Elusive American," written when the poet was 20, creates a lasting impression of a famous American character out of biographical research and empathetic intuition: Harry Houdini, who knew that all the world was a stage and he always belonged at its center. The illusionist, as the poet tells us,

... knew the counterfeit ease of a hustler in rented clothes
but walked through walls anyway
and when his mother smiled turned muscles to keys,
his devotion dissolving knots into rags...

          The poem captures the revealing peculiarities and the enduring elusiveness of this great escape artist. The poet was young, but there is nothing 'young' about the poem. 

         Joan Colby contributes the first 'Clio poem she wrote as a young woman: "Ah Clio -- Muse of History." The muse of history is surely a winning notion for poems, and this poem suggests its universal appeal, as we run into Clio

Walking all the breakwaters and levees
On observation decks staring
Out over all cities, chewing gum
In every Mobile comfort station,
Washing your hands.

          Mary McCarthy's "Madonna Song," written in the poet's twenties, imagines a commitment to great age, personal time merging with creation itself. As in the memorable lines:

I will be patient as stone
until wild men come
to beat war dances
on my bones

          In her youthful poem "The Scene," Tricia Knoll  connects The Pieta to the tragedy of a contemporary war.

In the black silken lap of Meurtra La Fois
Lies the drooling quiet head of Cornelius, her son,
Whose eyes slowly spin in rhythm
With the gray curls of his dusty hair.

          Unhappily, the lesson of this youthful poem is no less relevant today.

              You can read the rest of these poems and many others at 

 http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html