#6 [2020/CBR12] "Felicity" by Mary Oliver

Every once in awhile a poem is able to articulate a feeling or thought in a profound, emotional way that would never have occurred to me. I'm not a big reader of poetry and a lot of it is incomprehensible to me, so this doesn't happen to me often. But I'm always hopeful. So, when I saw Narfna's review of Felicity (2015) by Mary Oliver, I was intrigued. The promise of a short book with meaningful, understandable poems sounded fantastic. I also liked the poems that she included in her review, which was a good sign. 

I had not heard of Mary Oliver before, but she has an impressive resume with both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. She also died just last year after a battle with lung cancer. I was impressed by Oliver's book, and I was definitely able to pick out some favorites. 

My favorites include: (this is just a list with a description or a couple of my favorite lines, but not the whole poem--except for "Humility")

"This Morning" (39) - a simple story about redbird chicks hatching, but I loved the idea of optimism and possibility that comes with the miracle of the beginning of their lives.

"Humility" (33)

Poems arrive ready to begin

     Poets are only the transportation

"Storage" (31) - a nice minimalist point of view

"For the birds who own nothing--the reason they can fly."

"A House, or a Million Dollars" (71)

Love is the one thing the heart craves

and love is the one thing

you can't steal

"I Don't Want to Lose" (73)

I don't want to lose a single thread

from the intricate brocade of this happiness.

However, there were a number of times when the poems were more uncomfortable than relatable. Maybe I do better when reading poems about pain and loss, but sometimes Oliver was just a little too happy and confident for me.

For example, in "Moments" (9) she talks about "moments that cry out to be fulfilled" like "telling someone you love them" or "giving your money away, all of it." The last paragraph finishes with "There is nothing more pathetic than caution." I guess I'm pathetic then, because those choices do not sound appealing to me in the least. I wish this poem spoke to me in an inspiring way, but it really just makes me uncomfortable.

Similarly, "I Did Think, Let's Go About This Slowly" (51) seems to be about falling quickly into a loving relationship. It's a romantic idea, but I couldn't quite jump on board. Maybe I'm just cynical, but the relationships where I've fallen fast and did not do much thinking were not particularly great. The relationship I'm in now I'm being very cautious--perhaps too cautious, but in many ways it feels better than those where I've been entranced with my significant other.

Now that I'm writing about my discomfort with these poems, I kind of appreciate that Oliver is able to make me uneasy--especially when it comes to parts of my life where I've probably built up some walls. I'm definitely not throwing caution to the wind, but it gives me something to think about.

I'd recommend this book to those who enjoy poetry or want to try reading a book of poems that are meaningful without being too intimidating.

#2 [2019/CBR12] "Love Poems (for Married People)" by John Kenney

I was very excited when NPR's Best Books of 2019 List finally came out at the end of the year. I never have a problem finding books I want to read, but I'm always ready to add more to my list. And that's how I found Love Poems (for Married People) (2018)* by John Kenney.

At first glance, this might not seem like a book that would interest me. Most importantly, perhaps, I am not married. I am dating someone, but my relationships are few and far between. This "married people" intimacy thing is not something I'm familiar with. However, Kenney is a writer for the New Yorker, and this book apparently grew out of a popular humor column in the magazine. Also, Love Poems received many positive reviews, and it appeared to be funny, accessible, and short. Most importantly, I am not restricted to books that relate directly to me. Some of the best parts about reading are experiencing lives that are not your own. I can find situations that I haven't personally been in amusing, and I can relate to some other situations even though I've never been married.

And I enjoyed Love Poems. It was a very fast read. Sure, some poems I enjoyed more than others, but I laughed out loud more than once. They were all easy to follow, but generally clever and insightful. I mentioned the book to some married friends of mine, and they seemed interested in a possible Valentine's Day present that wasn't too sappy and romantic.

I could even personally relate to one poem, "Bedtime," which reminded me very much of me, and how I need my quiet space when I'm trying to sleep. Another favorite of mine was, "Sexting isn't this, apparently," which made me laugh. There is also a series of poems on marriage counseling that were consistently amusing.

There's not much else I can say to describe this book without simply copying some poems down, which would kind of ruin it. All I can say is that it's short, it's fun, and I enjoyed reading it.


* I'm not sure how this book ended up on NPR's 2019 list when the book's copyright says 2018, but I guess that's NPR's issue.

#45 [2016/CBR8] "Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls"

Since I had read The Gutsy Girl by Caroline Paul, Amazon recommended Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls (2014) ed. by Karen Finneyfrock, Rachel McKibbens, and Mindy Nettifee. I don't know how advanced Amazon's software is for these kinds of recommendations, but it worked. I was intrigued and ordered the book from my library.

This book is very different from The Gutsy Girl, which is a story of Paul's adventures and encouragement for younger girls to get out there and do things. Courage, on the other hand, is a book of poetry, and both the content and reading comprehension levels are for older teenagers. I would say Paul's book is more for older grade school and middle school ages while the poetry is more for high school students. Short author bios are at the end of the book, and most authors contributed more than one poem to the book.

The poetry was split into sections regarding family, love, and other subjects, although I found the poems to be so diverse that many of them did not fit easily into one category. Many of them had to do with self worth and our cultural obsession with beauty. Like most poetry that I read, some poems were very moving and relatable, while others were not. I'm sure it depends a lot on your own experiences and what resonates with you.

I did try to imagine what I would have thought of this book if I had read it as a high school student instead of a 37-year-old woman. And I'm not sure. It has taken me a long time to be patient enough to read books of poetry. But if I could have gotten past that, I think many of the poems I find moving now, I would have understood and appreciated then.

I had to use interlibrary loan to get this book, as there were only one or two copies in the entire state. And when I received it, it looked brand new. I'm glad that this book of poetry is out there for young women to have something to use to understand their experiences. However, it's usefulness is limited by its limited readership. I can't imagine the tweens of today putting down Twilight (or whatever the new Twilight is these days) and picking up this book of poetry, but there have to be some young women out there who would appreciate it. And it stretches my imagination even further to think of teenage boys reading a book of poetry by and about women, but why not?

As always when I read a book of poetry, I write down all my favorite poems in case I ever find the book again or want to look up any of the authors. Below were my favorite poems from Courage.

The Last Spell of the Sea Witch by Karen Finneyfrock (31)
Private Parts by Sarah Kay (32)
That Thing I Said That During Gym Shaney Jean Maney(52)
December by Erica Miriam Fabri (71)
Swarm by Jeanann Verlee (73)
Remembering the Night We Met by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (80)
1943 by Jessica Helen Lopez (86)
13 by Patricia Smith (p. 94, sect. 8, 9, 10)
The Waiting Room of the GYN by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (100)
Aubade With a Broken Neck by Traci Brimhall (104)
Pretty by Shaney Jean Maney(128)
Bloom by Tara Hardy (141)
The Nutritionist by Andrea Gibson (154)

#54 [2015/CBR7] "Brown Girl Dreaming" by Jacqueline Woodson

I'm a sucker for award-winning, young-adult novels. So, I can't remember how it came to be there now, but it's not too surprising that I had Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) by Jacqueline Woodson on my wait list at the library. From my diligent research before borrowing this book [reading the title], I assumed that it was the coming-of-age story of a young, black girl. On the one hand, I was right, Brown Girl Dreaming is a coming-of-age story. However, where I was expecting a fictional novel; this turned out to be a collection of autobiographical, narrative poems.

My mindset for reading poetry is very different than for reading novels. I generally have to be more patient with poetry, taking my time and soaking up the emotions, while novels feel more driven with story. I'm afraid I came to this book with the wrong mindset and sometimes got a little frustrated by the lack of details and plot. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that what I was reading was not what I was expecting and appreciate it for what it was.

Woodson's poems follow the chronology of her early life, following her birth in Ohio, her move with her mother to her Grandparent's home in South Carolina, and then a later move to Brooklyn. Each poem is a short, discrete chapter in Woodson's life, and she writes clearly and memorably. I found myself highlighting a number of lines as I read, appreciating the language. Woodson focuses a lot on her family and best friend, obviously incredibly meaningful relationships in her life.

Tomboy becomes my new name.
My walk, my mother says,
reminds her of my father.
When I move long-legged and fast away from her
she remembers him. (211)

There are also a number of poems showing the difficulty Woodson had with reading and doing well in school, even as she hungered to become a writer.

Even though so many people think my sister and I
are twins, I am the other Woodson, following behind her each year...
until one day, they walk into the classroom, almost call me Odel--then stop
remember that I am the other Woodson
and begin searching for brilliance
at another desk. (219)

Finally, Woodson also touches on racial issues, growing up in the years directly after the end of legal segregation.

It's hard not to see the moment--
my grandmother in her Sunday clothes, a hat
with a flower pinned to it
neatly on her head, her patent-leather purse,
perfectly clasped
between her gloved hands--waiting quietly
long past her turn. (238)

Everyone knows where they belong here.
It's not Greenville
but it's not diamond sidewalks either (305)

There were many other moments that moved me, and I wanted to take out a couple more quotes. I found, however, that these stories and poems work best in whole and intertwined within the entire book. One moment that almost made me cry because it was so sweet was when Jackie's best friend, Maria, casually mentions that Jackie is family to her. This passage is only so moving because of the previous poems describing their friendship as well as Jackie's insecurity when a third friend joins the mix. Taking out a little snippet just doesn't do it justice.

While reading this book, I sometimes got a little frustrated, wanting more detail and more of a story, but that's primarily a problem caused by my ignorant expectations. Looking back, Woodson's writing was memorable and moving.

#28 [2014/CBR6] "She Walks in Beauty" arr. by Caroline Kennedy

When I saw a clip of Caroline Kennedy on the Colbert Report discussing a book of poetry that she'd put together, I decided I needed to read it. In her introduction, Kennedy describes the book as "an anthology of poems centered around the stages of a woman's life." In it, she has managed to gather a good number of poems from a vast array of sources, including: Rainer Maria Rilke, Sylvia Plath, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, the Bible, and many others.

This book is separated into sections titled: Falling in Love; Making Love; Breaking Up; Marriage; Love Itself; Work; Beauty, Clothes and Things of This World; Motherhood; Silence and Solitude; Growing Up and Growing Old; Death and Grief; Friendship; and How to Live. Kennedy begins the book as well as each section with a short introduction mentioning some of her favorite poems.

When I first started reading, I was a little disappointed. I was expecting a collection of poems that embraced and celebrated women personally, as well as their role in the world. What I found instead felt like a reinforcement of traditional genders and stereotypes as well as a lack of a pervasive theme. I think it was the section on marriage that jumped from a loving poem about partnership to some brutal poem where the man kills her lover and tricks her into eating his heart. Perhaps I went into this one with unrealistic expectations, but I initially felt stifled and confused.

But then I kept reading and I found myself highlighting more and more of the poems. Although my earlier criticism still stands, I had no problems with the poems being too esoteric, and I found many of them worth marking for later re-reading. My favorite section was "How to Live," which included some of the more inspirational poems.

I do wish Kennedy had included, at the least, the date of each poem. She jumped dramatically from poems hundred of years apart, and a little more context would have been helpful. Also, I saw at the end of my Kindle book that a number of poems (less than ten, but still) were not included in the Kindle version because there was some problem with the electronic rights. This was disappointing. I tried to find the ones I was missing on the internet, and I was able to read one. However, I'm a completist, and now I feel I'm missing out. Three of those poems were by Julia Alvarez, so I now have two books by her on my to-read list. I read through this book of poetry relatively quickly with only occasional bursts of impatience or boredom. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys poetry.

Like the couple of other poetry books I've read, I marked down my favorite poems, which I will list here, so I can perhaps find them later:
-The Weather-Cock Points South by Amy Lowell (32)
-Youth by Osip Mandelstam, trans. by W.S. Merwin (44)
-Well, I Have Lost You by Edna St. Vincent Millay (61)
-To the Ladies by Lady Mary Chudleigh (83)
-From a Survivor by Adrienne Rich (97)
-To Paula in Late Spring by W.S. Merwin (101)
-Code Poem for the French Resistance by Leo Marks (112)
-Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare (114)
-Night Waitress by Lynda Hull (127)
-The Great Lover by Rupert Brooke (168)
-Vietnam by Wislawa Szymborska (199)
-The Summer Day by Mary Oliver (230)
-I stepped from plank to plank by Emily Dickinson (232)
-Sign by Marge Pierry (239)
-Remember by Christina Rossetti (255)
-That it is a road by Ariwara Na Narihari (258)
-To be of use by Marge Piercy (295)
-Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski (297)
-September, 1918 by Amy Lowell (300)
-May today there be peace within by St. Teresa of Avila

#25 (2013/CBR5) "Finding My Elegy" by Ursula K. Le Guin

When the pure act turns to drygoods
and the endless yearning
to an earned sum,
when payday comes:

the silly sniveling soul
had better run
stark naked to the woods
and dance to the beating drums (first two stanzas of Middle, p. 15)

Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems (2012) by Ursula K. Le Guin was both a book and author I'd never heard of before I spotted this book in the library. The cover picture and title caught my eye, and I grabbed it on a whim. I like poetry when I understand it, and if it means something to me it can be incredibly powerful. However, I don't have a lot of experience with it. I don't really know the right way to attack a book of poetry and probably even less about reviewing a book of poetry. My personal strategy is just to read and see if something grabs me--usually either the choice of words or the meaning. And if it doesn't, I just move on. This makes for a somewhat uneven reading experience, which I'm guessing is normal when reading a book of poetry. Sometimes I find myself reading poem after poem with nothing really hitting me. I start to worry if the rest of the book is going to be the same. And then I'll come upon one that hits on my most personal feelings or fears but found a better way of expressing them. It's like finding an unexpected $10 bill in your pocket.

Ursula K. Le Guin is a renowned author of over sixty books of fiction, fantasy, science fiction, children's literature, poetry, drama, and more. She's won a bunch of literary prizes and one of her young adult books is now on my to-read list. I think it was partly Le Guin's breadth of work that convinced me to try her poems. I figured someone with an interest in so many different things would have interesting things to say.  

Finding My Elegy includes poems from 1960-2010. They are separated by topic. And here is where the review part of my review gets difficult: summarizing a book of poems written over half a century and regarding a wide variety of topics is challenging. I did find that Le Guin has a strong connection to the environment around her. She looks at questions of injustice as well as some more difficult questions of death--at least those were her poems that spoke most to me. I'd say that if you like poetry, then this book is worth reading.

Below, for my own sake, is a list of my favorite poems from this book in case I want to go back and read them over again someday.
-Ars Lunga (8)
-Song (9)
-The Marrow (13)
-Middle (15)
-The Aching Air (52-54)
-Infinitive (63)
-FIELD BURNING DEBATED, SALMON FATE DISCUSSED. (66)
-April in San Jose (73)
-Mount Rainier from Amtrak (74)
-Here, There, at the Marsh (81)
-A Request (89)
-The Mistake (100)
-The Next War (101)
-The Crest (102)
-Soldiers (103-105)
-The Elders at the Falls (109)
-Creation of the Horse (126)
-Grace (129)
-At the Center (151)
-GPS (156)
-Travel (161)
-My Birthday Present (164)
-Body of Water (170)
-Science (182)
-January Night Prayer (187)

Redux #18 - "Migration" by W.S. Merwin

SEPARATION

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color. (84)

Marra Alane posted this poem on her website a while ago, and I loved the true, sad, simplicity of it. In fact, I was so immediately enamored with the writer that I went to the library and picked up Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005) by W.S. Merwin. Now, the last time I remember actually reading a poem for its own sake was back in English class in high school. And I didn't get it. For the most part, I'm a very concrete person. I revel in exact details and descriptions and knowing exactly what occurred and what the author is trying to say. So, even with my goal of expanding and diversifying my reading, an entire book of poems is a big step for me. And if I wasn't intimidated enough: when I received the book, I found over 500 dense pages packed with hundreds of poems. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to start out with such a large compendium, but I didn't know any better. I wasn't sure if I would ever even get the nerve to crack it open, let alone read the entire thing. It has been months since I started reading this book, and it's definitely bogged me down, but I have finally managed to get through the entire thing.

It's important to note that despite my penchant for takings things too literally, I am pretty introspective and have a deep appreciation for poetry. In fact, I've found that I get over bad break-ups by pouring all my hurt and angry feelings into a poem. I can write pages and pages in a journal on how I'm feeling, but it's amazing how cathartic it is to distill all those thoughts into the short, perfect form of a poem. It's surprised me how little I need to write when I'm choosing my words so carefully, and it's helped me through two painful break-ups. I guess I've stumbled on some very cheap but useful therapy.

Now to get on with the actual book, Migration is a compilation of poems from 15 different published works as well as some new poems by W.S. Merwin. The poems were published over fifty years, from 1952 to 2004 and range widely in style and subject. I'm sure that Cannonball Read is not the best way to read poetry, and even though I spread this book out over a couple of months, it took a lot of focus to finish this one. My complete lack of knowledge about poetry also didn't help. By the end, I was so desperate to move on to something new that I pushed through to the end, not wanting to give up on something I'd already put so much effort into. And it's not that the poems were bad at all, but they took a lot of time, a lot of concentration, and there's no narrative or story to help get me through the book. Some of the poems (like the one above), I just got. They were moving, powerful and amazing to read. Other poems might have had some beautiful and interesting language, but I wouldn't really understand what Merwin was trying to say. And then there were others that just left me clueless. My reading went something like this: ooh, that was amazing; don't get it; don't get it; don't get it; ooh pretty language; who is that guy Merwin's talking about; huh; don't get it; etc. If there weren't so many poems, I could have spent a little more time digesting, looking up unknown names, and trying to understand them, but there were just too many for me to do that. So, if they didn't hit me over the head right away, I rarely read them twice looking for understanding.

I'm afraid that all this rambling on doesn't do justice to Merwin's writing or give a good idea of Migration. It's almost impossible to "sum up" hundreds of completely different poems from over fifty years of an author's life, but I can try by noting that some common themes of Merwin were perspectives, writing, death, the passage of time, and some environmentalism. Some of the language was original, beautiful, and inspiring, and I was very impressed with what I read. Although Migration might have been a little ambitious for my first foray into the world of poetry, I'm glad I read it and I'm looking forward to reading some more poetry in the future. Perhaps something a little smaller and/or annotated, though.

The following is just a list I'm writing for myself. As I read Migration, I noted my favorite poems and their page numbers. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to end up buying Migration someday to peruse at my leisure and I want to be able to find my favorites.
"The Station" (35)
"Burning the Cat" (39)
"Foghorn" (50)
"Plea for a Captive" (59)
"Separation" (84)
"For the Grave of Posterity" (102)
"The Plaster" (126)
"December Night" (127)
"The Cold Before the Moonrise" (128)
"How We Are Spared" (129)
"For the Anniversary of My Death" (131)
"When the War is Over" (134)
"For a Coming Extinction" (137)
"Fly" (139) - disturbing
"Something I've Not Done" (190)
"The Unwritten" (196)
"Yesterday" (245)
"Berryman" (255)
"Lives of the Artists" (310)
"The Red" (386)
"Green Fields" (392)
"This Time" (478)
"The Marfa Lights" (487)
"Unknown Bird" (497)