The Garden of Verse: Verse-Virtual's September Shopping Bag Holds Mrs. P's Groceries And Many Other Treats

 

So many fine poems in Verse-Virtual’s September issue. Here are my comments on a few that I particularly enjoyed... 

I have read with admiration previous offerings from the mind of 

Robert Wexelbatt’s worldly, cynical, sharp-eyed Mrs. Podolski. Here 

in “Helping Mrs. Podolski Put Away Her Groceries,” Mrs. P. reflects on the pedestrian appetites of her late husband in a voice as unromantic, perceptive, and real-world as ever: 

He preferred beef to chicken or pork and

spit out my one attempt at tofu. 

Well, in fairness, so did I.  No take-out

but his precious pepperoni pizzas. 

Would you wash off those potatoes, dear—and 

just set them on the drainboard?

From her husband’s throw-back diet, Mrs. P. moves on to universal

considerations, revealing a capacity for suave and learned citations. 

On skin treatments she offers Nietzsche:

The earth has a skin,/ and that skin has diseases; 

one of its/ diseases is called man.

 

Poetic voice is what we admire in Sylvia Cavanaugh’s lovely poem 

“Gift Shoes from Philadelphia,” as in these lines:

As a child I had no idea

shoes even came in green,

or that love could take the form

of gift shoes from Philadelphia.

The implicit nostalgia for an early awakening, invented or not, 

flowers fantastically in the verses to come:

Someday, a left-handed gentleman

may offer you an oyster on the half shell

in the bright afternoon

and you could become Venus…

Read on in this delightfully lyrical fantasy as those ‘gift shoes’ find

other feet.

 

It’s the voice again that attracts me in Arlene Gay Levine’s poem 

“The Journey.” The poem begins with the existential pronouncement 

of a contingent universe: “A day begins; there are no promises.” 

But then we leave the known world behind:

One day we will slip from our bodies

and slide into the Light; this we know.

 Perhaps to rouse from sleep and put aside

the fear that hunts our hearts…

The poem takes off from here to pronounce what else “we know,” continuing 

to treat us to an elegant use of the elevated tone.

 

               Jefferson Carter’s “Hot Tub” flat out makes me laugh, 

from the first lines:

I confess.  We own

a hot tub.  Nothing 

ostentatious,…

               This confession is required, we learn, because the tub’s 

presumed ‘luxury’ consumption of hot water is politically incorrect 

in the opinion of the poet’s “tree-hugger friends.” I hug as many trees 

as the next guy, but I don’t think we have to go after hot tubs until 

we all agree to stop getting on jet airplanes. The poet contemplates 

his friends’ scolds, the poem tells us, until we arrive at this lovely 

and only slightly barbed image: 

as my hands flower open,

as the steam rises like smoke

through the branches

of our invasive olive tree.

 

               The spare, sharp-tooled voice in Jim Lewis’s “gemstone” captivates 

me as well. Its opening lines hammer away, carefully, precisely, 

at the object of the speaker’s terse observations: 

you are hard she said

hard headed

hard hearted

hard won

               The poem strikes me as an object lesson in the uses of 

economy and repetition. Bereft of punctuation and qualifiers, 

its strokes work efficiently toward the second-person speaker’s 

half-surprising conclusion. 

you see yourself

as common stone

but you will be 

the center jewel

in my crown

               There’s a final twist at the end; I won’t spoil it here. 

          Equally enjoyable in a different, conversational vein is David Graham’s

 “Lament for Kmart,” a knowingly tongue-in-cheek encomium for a low-end 

marketer I also confess to missing. How can anyone resist a poem

 that begins: “

How I used to relish wandering those broad glossy aisles/

with Walt Whitman at my side!”

What’s not to embrace under the store’s “dozen fluorescent suns”? 

The down-market big box store was a simple celebration of 

indiscriminate American bounty: 

We grinned at T shirts/ in hefty sizes, work shirts unsullied 

by designer tags.

And it concludes with another glance at Whitman’s universal embrace 

of his country, as rows of unplugged TV monitors reflect the faces 

of passing shoppers who become momentary screen stars:

just American faces leaning and loafing at our ease,

in vain the speeding or shyness as we starred in one

TV program after another, our show brief as a sunbeam

glinting on a passing windshield.

 

So many excellent poems in September’s Verse-Virtual. Find them here: 

https://verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html

The link Verse-Virtual Sept. 2021