[T]ime is a horse, a runaway
none of us can dismount
and so
the need is to find a
way to enjoy the wind
that snatches handfuls
of your hair as you race,
the horse’s mane, your
man, the rhythm
and energy of the
haunches powering under you,
their easy
determination
to go on running.
from CRAVE by Christine Gelineau. NYQ Books, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63045-020-5 buy CRAVE
on Amazon
The front cover of Crave pictures the neck and head of a
white horse on a white background. It
looks away from us, toward the edge of the page. Toward what it craves? Any of you who know horse energy, as well
as those who don’t, will find satisfaction for your poetic cravings between the
book’s covers.
Crave is a meaty, earthy book of narrative and lyric poems rooted
in Christine Gelineu’s rural life on a horse farm. Many poems also concern matters beyond the farm. The book is divided into two sections:
“Hard Evidence” consists of fifteen poems that recount what destructive
cravings can cost the human soul and society, and “Crave” consists of 31 poems
about cravings that push life along, through good times and bad, but ever
forward. The half-dozen poems that have to do with horses left me feeling like
the book is about horses, for that kind of energy drives the poems in
this book about the powerful rhythms that fuel life in our earthly bodies. Also, in line
with poetic trends, there are several Ekphrastic and other form poems in a text
of predominantly free verse poems.
The poems in the first
section, “Hard Evidence,” recount public and private events, both local and
international. They touch on the
personal cost of ignorance, betrayal, criminal behavior, and just plain
difficult circumstances. They are heavy
reading, and could discourage one from reading on, but that would be a
mistake, so please, keep turning the pages.
“What Men Do” is one of
Gelineau’s horse poems from this first section. It combines a personal story
about an injured farm cat that had to be put down with an account of World War
I Australian soldiers who brought their horses to war, but were not allowed to
bring them home for fear of carrying new diseases back to their island
country. The personal event: “While he
aims, hesitates, she/waits. He shoots,/then again to be sure.//Apologists call
it “the final kindness.”/What men do when they live up/to what is owed.” These sentiments will be familiar to anyone
who has had to have a cat euthanized, particularly if one is acquainted with rural
and farm life. The Australian story is much
less common, and I was glad of the preparation the cat story provided.
That final night together,
the hardened young soldiers
gathered their horses for a race meet,
to drink in one last time that joy
in what their bodies could do.
Race over, they swiped and curried
the sweated necks, sleek flanks,
disentangled forelocks,
fed their darlings tobacco and fruits
then each laid his pistol
in the hollow above his horse’s eye
and squeezed.
Some of us spend time
pondering the cost of war—in money, lives taken and damaged. How many of us ponder the cost of war to
animals—horses, dogs, dolphins we recruit, or animals we simply encounter in
the execution of war in theater. And to the animal soul of people attached to these creatures.
The poems in Part 2,
“Crave” I would characterize as life cycle love poems: love of the physical life, the land and the
world, love in birth and death, animal love, family and maternal love, love of
art, married love, romantic love, and sexual passion ( of corn, among other
things). For me a number of poems, some mentioned below, also hint at tribute to great poets who have gone before.
“Orbit,” the first poem
in the section is an ars poetica prose
poem that puts me in the mind of Maya Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman.” It is a sassy, musical dance with “verbs hot
enough to broil a sausage on, even cooled it is too saucy for the gander.” It joyously tugs and grinds the reader out of
the somberness of the first section of the book.
“Felt like a Thought”
is about the wonders of the fall season in the Northeastern United States. The references
to “the tumult of geese chevrons/clamorously rowing the skies overhead,” provide
an almost iconic image of the region referenced by so many poets, including
Mary Oliver.
“Anniversary in Paris,”
about the love of the long married, references the trend of young lover to
place a padlock on le Pont de l’Archevêché.
“[T]hey kiss and toss the key to the Seine./Forty years into our
marriage we know better than to think of love/as a lock.”
“Curing” tells the
story of life in a family house from the time of its building, to the raising
and sending off of children and generations of horses. “These days I stand in
the past even when I am/most present, most in the present, my memories the
element/through which I experience experience. Is this richness?//or rigidity?” A phenomenon and question well known to those
of a certain age.
The first two lines of
“Grace,” a poem about a dying friend are: “If you’re lucky, at some
point/ordinary life becomes itself: something to inhabit, rather than/something
to pass through. “ A better description of an embodied life is hard to find.
Let’s close with some
lines from two of my favorite poems: “Love Among the Long-married” and “To-Do
List for the Final Decades,” both of which evoke the joys of enduring marital
love. First from “Love Among the
Long-married:”
For their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary,
the long-married plant a tree.
Yes, they are exactly
that stubborn.
***
The long-married tell one another:
Our memories
are not what they used to be
but in memory
we are who we used
to be:
your touch
your touch alone
and we slip slick
into our 26 year-old bodies
young
electric and sleek
no one else
no one else
can offer that
Next, some wonderful
suggestions from the “To Do List for the Final Decades:”
Fall in love in a foreign language.
Compose a navigation song to chart your losses,
And the way back.
Learn to skate on the skin, the inexpressibly thin
membrane where water meets air:
master the skill of carving a caress
into that tensile surface, a calligraphy
as tender as hope.
And to finish, these lines
that put me in mind of Leonard Cohen lyrics:
Accommodate your own prodigal idealism: kill
the fatted calf for truth; strike
the timbrel, sing in the purpled
shadows of dusk now, sing.
Wave farewell with the torn
scarf of your heart.
Welcome into yourself the evening’s holy silence.
I can’t think of a
better way to end in that song, or this review.
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