Two Books of Poetry for Your "Ready to Buy These" List

The cover photo is from the 1960s ... the author's family.

 

It's a tough time economically in America. That's not new. Sure, a lot of people owning houses and raising children in the 1950s and 1960s felt like their American Dream had come true, and they even had retirement packages for later.

But the 1930s involved plenty of crushing poverty and despair, and the 1940s saw Americans sacrificing for global warfare. The 1970s? After the Vietnam War ended, it seemed things would get easier. Buying a house with a young family felt normal then.

Things have changed. 

For a lot of us (outside the billionaires group), spending money can be kind of scary, because it's so hard to know whether we'll "have enough" to see us through the years ahead. 

Do you keep a list -- on paper, in your phone, or in your thoughts -- of the treats you're going to indulge in?  I have a very basic wish list that includes upgrading my mattress and, when I can't push the lawnmower as well, maybe opting for a riding version. 

Fortunately, as a writer, books aren't on the optional list. They are necessities. I recharge the word fountains by savoring the really good stuff that other people put on paper.

If you get discouraged, have days when "the blues" settle in, are still recovering from some challenges of childhood or adult "big losses," books might be on your necessities list, too.  Or, of course, among the "let's have a treat today!" options.

Recently I bought new mysteries by Jane Harper (superb Australian writer) and Tana French (Irish, and because I reread her books once a year or so, they are really worth spending for), as well as Charles Todd. I did buy this year's Louise Penny Three Pines novel. And I have some things to say later this weekend about Sujata Massey's fifth mystery that features young woman lawyer Perveen Mistry (this one's 1922).

And sure, I recommend those authors, and often review crime fiction at KingdomBks.blogspot.com, one of my other blogs.

But I'm slow to purchase poetry, because I want it to always be the kind I'll be re-reading. (Did we mention economic tough times?) I want to savor it, maybe learn from it, feel grateful that the poet can pull together thoughts and feelings in ways that confirm my own, even lift me up.

Which brings me at last to the point: Get yourself a copy of AMERIGUN by Anne Marie Macari.

Never heard of her? Well, how many of those crime fiction novelists I listed have you heard of? One or two? That's not because the others aren't terrific ... it's because advertising budgets get slanted to the books that the publishers figure will make a Big Profit. Which might not be the case for this slim 67-page collection. Since it's amazing, beautiful, heartbreaking, and thought-provoking, I guess we'll have to share word of AMERIGUN with each other!

Writing forty years after her brother Edward's death by self-inflicted gunshot -- which he explains, maybe through a "medium," was an accident -- Macari faces the role of firearms among us. Yes, of course, the clever machine called a handgun (my second husband, R, a gunsmith, adored their mechanisms) can't fire its deadly round without a person's hand involved. 

But Macari allows the American gun -- AMERIGUN -- itself to take on personality. One of the poems reads:

Sometimes I see the gun entering
the room   it is smiling and has come

from a different world made
of materials I don't

understand.    When it calls you
with its steely music how

can you resist its metal grip grazing
your skin like another

hand warming yours —

Macari goes on to the sexuality of the gun (the way cigarettes have been; remember those Marlboro ads, the ranch hand leaning back provocatively against a horse, cigarette in his fingers, held low by his hips and holster or close to his lips). She touches discreetly, feather-light, on the firearm as American symbol. Spills some sorrowing statistics of children's gun deaths, lets anger flicker among her fireworks of phrases. Weaves in the losses of people who've shaped her life since her brother's death -- including other poets you may recognize. 

And at last, because she is one of our poets who values and can sing the words of life's enormous beauty, she brushes her fingers against forgiveness, that sweetener of painful memory.

Go ahead, treat yourself. The book costs less than dinner out, and will satisfy much longer. 

* * 

Oh, that second book to carry on your list and get around to buying soon? It's mine -- THRESHOLDS -- where you and I get to share and reflect the transitions of our lives. Let me know if you'd like a signed bookplate mailed to you, wherever you are, or visit northeastern Vermont and maybe we will cross paths. No firearms involved in this collection, but I promise to salute my "ex" by allowing them into a later group of poems, already gathering. 

 

"This Is the Real Thing": THRESHOLDS, an Exploration of Transitions

My new book of poems. Available in bookshops and online.

My buddy B and I shared a long lunch at a community restaurant today, and wrapped it up with identical slices of coconut cream pie. It was very satisfying, as we talked about wide-ranging topics that matter to us.

Running through much of the hour and a half was a repeated theme: If we're not looking into mirrors, we forget that we've become "old." Of course, it depends on how you define that -- but we're over 70, and when we were young adults, 70 was the edge of Old Age, something that seemed foreign and even spooky. What if you fall down and break a hip? What if your mind starts to slide? What if your relatives and friends think you are boring?

None of those have happened to either of us (*yet*).  But we walk in a landscape that can be mysterious, baffling, and hard to predict. And yes, we watch our footing literally. I climbed a steep ridge before lunch, and on my way back down, I held my arms out to both sides, for better balance.

Aging as a transition is not as drastic as leaving home for college, or falling in love, or experiencing pregnancy or (gulp) loss of a child at any age. It happens that B and I have both experienced loss of a much-loved spouse, to a fatal illness. Time has passed since those losses began, and we mention our husbands' names with affection, more often than with sorrow or pain.

Transition. With it comes the magic of the "liminal," the borderland where things aren't quite confirmed. In poems I often pull up imagery like mists, rivers, boundaries. This is what it is to walk forward into change. To walk up to, and then across, a threshold.

What have you learned from facing and walking into transitional times in your life? This is open for your comments (although they get screened, so you won't see them post right away). Conversation.

Thanks, B, for today's shared and sweet adventure. 

* *

A bit of the poem "Wilderness" from the book:

 There could be worse

wilderness to walk, you know; others have had it hard too, and
they didn't have such good boots to wear. The little things.
Let's count them now, together. 

April Is National Poetry Month -- and I'm All In on This One!

Today you can read "Hometown" in RockPaperPoem literary magazine -- I wrote it when translator Tony Hao, a resident artist here with Catamount Arts, suggested ways to write about our home towns, and I realized I didn't have one. Where I grew up is so different from where I live now, and my roots are confused. See what you think: https://rockpaperpoem.com/current-issue/

I'll be at the St. Johnsbury PoemTown reading at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum on Saturday April 11, at 4 pm -- my two poems displayed downtown for this year's Poem Town are "Voices in the Night" (at Momentum Business Solutions at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and Railroad Street), and "Revolution" at Caledonia Plant Shop (nearby at 18 Eastern Ave). I'll post photos of them soon, but you can stroll the town and read these, along with many other wonderful insights.

I'll be at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier on Sunday April 26, 4:30 pm, along with other Northeast Kingdom writers including Judith Janoo and S.J. (Steve) Cahill, as well as my old friend Garret Keizer and long-ago Kingdom Books ally Chard deNiord, and others. 

Last but not least, on April 27 there will be four of us reading online with the Vermont Jewish Poets -- if that's meaningful to you, do look into it.

Watch for a BIG announcement about my poetry collection THRESHOLDS later this week. 

So ... am I working hard enough? 

After all that, you've earned a bit of a poem, right? This is from "Voices in the Night":

   

                            Here, the language of trauma (reddened, sore)

and the language of regret (tender apology for a path not seen) mingle,

soft balm to burned fingers. We always wanted to hear each other,

didn’t we? But accent and origin, animal nature, our canine, feline,

equine coughs of distress fell like rough echoes. What you say at night

your voice uncovering, discovering, slicing, even scarring: I hear you

with an organ centered just below my beating heart. 

BK