The Garden of Verse: A Warm Poetic Harvest in a Chilly Winter Month

          Weather's fine. Weather's foul. It's winter time in the city -- and the country, and the suburbs, and everywhere else. Though, I'm told, the temps are pleasantly warm in Sri Lanka, as they are in Cancun on the Mexican coast. 

            Thankfully up here in the north, we have poetry to keep us warm.  

            Here are my thoughts on some of the many fine poems I admired in the February issue of Verse-Virtual. http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

            Judy Kronenfeld's poem "Ex-New Yorker Remembers Her Natural Landscape" is a pleasure trip from its perfect title onward -- the 'natural landscape' of the urban childhood lives on in the heart and senses. I love the epithets that introduce successive stanzas on the city's various characteristics: Fortress City, Tree-house city, Infinite city, Intimate city, Vertiginous city. And the rich imagery that follows from the title metaphor, in lines such as lines:

"and far below, five o’clock tides
of dusky forests surge forward,
each tree moated by its inner
silence"

            A truly evocative poem.

            Robert Wexelblatt's "Mrs. Podolski’s Critique of Judgment" is a superb rendering of a worldly woman's skeptical view of the deeds of men and women, particularly of men in this poem. The poem suggests that human beings make up, and remake, our notions of right and wrong as we go along through the life, so that the ethical may in fact be situational. So many pleasingly voiced concrete particulars illustrate the unfolding argument, starting right from the top:

"Certainty’s the clothesline on which we pin
the wash of our unmentionable doubt;
the dubious laundry we take in to make
believe we’re sure of what we’re sure about."

            Dewitt Clinton's poem titled, in part, "is it Possible to Write an After After?," asks that question following the mention of poems by David Graham and Robert Bly (good company, for sure). For me, the poem raises the probably unanswerable question of the relationship between time and permanence, a question poets (Shakespeare comes to mind) and philosophers have long asked. I take the poem's answer from these memorable lines. "... oh, and who

Can ever remember the time we crossed
The cold Atlantic and dined under new
Stars, and then I take a picture of you,
looking so longingly to Lady Liberty.
Don’t you remember that? And then,
Soon, we can’t even see land as we’re
So far away, we can’t see anything but
Waves, waves, way too many waves."

            Yes, I think, we do remember. Despite the waves.

            Barbara Crooker's wise and finely observed ekphrastic poem "Books," begins with "a world where books were scarce. Where copying was done by human hand" and describes the image of a saint holding such a book. But then the poem steps away and turns its attention to what philosophers call 'the sensuous immediate' of a blackbird's song: "its clear six notes the only sound.
They pierce me like nails.  He might be saying
Listen, listen, listen."

            This is not a poem about what poetry is, but what poets do. The bird's call is a reminder:

"my job is to pay attention."

            Of the three vivid, wintry poems from Steve Klepetar, I particularly enjoyed "Acting Normal," a poem that attributes an uncanny importance to the nonhuman actors in the world drama of which we're a part -- but only a part. And we don't necessarily know where the play is going.

            Blue jays (the poem tells us) "are everywhere." More disturbing, perhaps is the information "that here
in Berkshire county there are thousands
of bears, that any time you’re in the woods,
you’re not too far from one." This piece of information leads to the superbly ominous (yet also somehow humorous) final two sentences. Rather than offering a spoiler quote here, I urge everyone to read the poem.

            Another pleasingly wintry poem -- and urban poem -- is Robert Johnson's "FEBRUARY IN THE CITY," evoking

"a day so harsh and beautiful" and delivering a strong and paradoxical conclusion. Again, please read it for yourself.

            In J.R. Sonche's poem "TWO PORTRAITS BY MATHEW BRADY" the visual subject is a famous photographer's take on two famous poets. The poem points out, in detail, how thoroughly the portrait of Walt Whitman captures the relaxed, natural, open-hearted everyman -- certainly one side of the poet's self-image. But gender, this poem shrewdly notices, is a tricky matter for the all-encompassing Whitman.

"He looks like a grandfather, Walt does. Better than that, Walt looks like a grandmother, even with the beard, a grandmother, kindly and wise."

            As the poem points out, Brady's portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne gives a very different impression.

              Kate Sontag's "Recognition Scene" is another poem with a shrewd title. A dramatic high point in classical literature, the recognition scene for the donor of the "bulky blue coat" in this poem comes in the supermarket:

"You want to apologize to its wearer, pushing
            her grocery cart past the dairy section,
 for the tiny hole in the left pocket revealing a wintery
            tuft of polyester fill, the linty purple socks you threw
last minute into the duffle along with wrinkled flannel
            shirts and a pilled bathrobe long overdue for Goodwill."

            The poem mines the rich detail and consequent reflection caused by this encounter, in which the self discovers in the stranger wearing her coat a 'secret' double. Again, the last lines in this well wrought poem repay a reading.

              A lot of nourishment in February's issue for a winter month whose best feature is its brevity.