Sundress
Publications, 2016
ISBN:
978-1-939675-39-2
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Karen
Craigo
is the author of No More Milk
(Sundress, 2016), and she has two forthcoming collections, due out this summer:
Passing Through Humansville
(Sundress) and Escaped Housewife Tries
Hard to Blend In (Tolsun Books). She maintains the blog Better View of the Moon, which deals
with writing and creativity, and she is also a freelance writer and editor.
_________
I've
never met Karen Craigo in person. We're
friends on Facebook, and she wrote a blurb for my
prose poetry chapbook The Fire Circle (Blue
Lyra Press,
2016). I believe I originally heard of Karen at least ten years ago, if not
fifteen, when she was an editor for a literary journal I was dying to be
published in. I so enjoyed her chapbook Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to
Blend In (Hermeneutic Chaos, 2016), and I immediately ordered her poetry
collection No More Milk. After reading the first poem, "Down Will
Come," and finding myself in tears, I knew it was a book I wanted to
review. (Read my interview with Karen Craigo here.) —Karen L. George
__________
Review of Karen
Craigo's No More Milk
The poems in Karen Craigo's No More Milk are meditations, praise songs
and prayers about love and loss, connection and separation, scarcity and
abundance, resilience and vulnerability. They take place in a garden, a field, the
woods, a hotel, a church, at an ocean, at home, in bed, in a car, at a grocery,
and a food bank. They pay attention to the sacred and the messy as they examine
the mysteries of motherhood, beauty, memory, imagination, and spirituality that
fuel and transform us as human beings.
The
beginning poem, "Down Will Come," references a traditional nursery
rhyme lullaby a mother sings while rocking her baby. The poem opens with the
mother, the "I" of the poem, admitting, "I'm really not much /
of a singer." I was struck by the matter-of-fact tone and plain language,
and by how the line break adds a haunting meaning to begin the collection with:
"I'm really not much" which for me vibrates throughout the collection
in its images, themes, and tensions of scarcity vs. abundance.
The
next lines establish the collection's intense feeling of intimacy, of a mother
beside you, speaking directly to you:
"Tonight / I rockabye the baby." The poet uses a striking
image to describe this rocking:
the way you'd rock
a
truck from a snowdrift,
grinding
gears over
lowest
notes...
It's such an unusual pairing of
rocking a baby to sleep with song, which the narrator says she considers
"holy," and the above image and its suggested "grinding"
sounds. This intriguing comparison establishes a tension in the poem that
threads throughout this collection.
The poem continues with the intriguing question:
...Was there ever
such
music as your own
mother's
voice, filtered
through
the drumhead
of
her sternum, growl
of
song and blood
and
breath?
The above breathtaking lines contain
such longing and tenderness. They invite the reader to consider their own
memories of their mother's voice, and how they might have heard it when they
were being carried in her womb—such a
powerful image. The "growl / of song and blood / and breath" also
presages other poems that sing of the body. And in the "growl / of
song" there is again this unusual pairing that sets up a tension or rub
that adds interest to the poem. It also echoes the earlier comparison of
rocking a baby to rocking a truck from a snowdrift.
The poem ends speaking about memory
and how it can transform with time, ending with an image inferring the vulnerability
that memory opens us up to, and the vulnerabilities of babies, mothers—all humans alive:
...And even
if
it wasn't beautiful then,
it
is now, in memory,
her
real voice a bough
breaking
crisp on the phone
hundreds
of miles
from
where you fall.
One of the things I admire most
about No More Milk is the way the
poems connect to each other. The title
of the first poem, "Down Will Come," speaks to the second poem
"Milk" by invoking the image of a mother's milk coming down. In "Milk" the mother is "a thousand
miles away" from her baby, and is having a difficult time hand-pumping
milk. She says:
My
baby and I are near the end.
It's
no one's fault. Each day
I
have less to give.
Such simple words that speak so
eloquently, layered with emotion and meaning—imply
not just this particular narrator, her baby and a lack of milk, but how everyone
in the world struggles with scarcity and regret. She opens the third stanza
with "The world is dense with hunger" and the literal and figurative
image of having to pull her baby's "fist from his mouth / just to feed him,"
and how "for some / hunger is a fist that never stops / being a
fist." The fist suggests that hunger—the
many desperate forms of lack and longing that exist in this world. The narrator
also implies that sometimes all we can do is nurture ourselves:
...I
couldn't dump that milk.
For
the baby in the courtyard,
for
my baby, for all
the
babies, I drank it down.
Milk is used as a symbol throughout
these poems, as a source of sustenance, a gift a mother can give to her child—the first, elemental nourishment we give and receive as
humans—the embodiment of love. In "Hours after Anger, He Wakes
Me" a son spilling milk leads to anger, tears, a nightmare, regret, grace,
and a prayer the poet describes as:
...vague, no words,
almost
an odor of regret and shame.
I
stayed awake to write this poem
and
to draw a symbol on the fat
wedge
of my thumb—a secret mark
that
means Love the boy better,
keep him, pin him to this Earth.
This poem speaks so intimately of
love between a child and a mother and its inevitable failings and complications.
In "Three Tips for Inhabiting Our Material World" the narrator also
speaks of the sacred connection between a mother and son, by telling how he
brings her feathers:
...He smuggles
these
to me in secret,
like
the code
to
a lock, and I keep them
in
a vase—glorious
tail
feathers, pin feathers,
scraps
from a wing.
He
knows I love these
artifacts
of flight or battle,
prismatic,
pocket-bent
or
frayed.
It's significant that the poet describes the
feathers as "scraps" which implies scarcity, and also as
"artifacts of flight or battle," and not just "prismatic"
but also "pocket-bent / or frayed." These words suggest the
complexities and dualities of life that no doubt the mother and the son are
continuing to learn and to teach each other. The poem ends with an intriguing
and beautiful idea of the son "working on a notion / of place—about where / we might settle together, / and with what / we
may line our nest." This image of a nest echoes so many of the other poems
in the idea of hungering for nourishment (literal and figurative), and longing
to find a home—your place in, and your connections to, a family, a
community, and the world. The poem "Half-Buried" begins with the
lines, "Eyes-down is how you see / the nests of things." In "Ars
Poetica" the narrator says:
I
could feel all
I
was losing: I was
a
hollow tree, enough space
beneath
my sternum
for
a nest. There was no one
to
hold me but the world,
the
empty air.
There is such a sense of yearning in
the above lines, of wanting to create and nourish, and to also find the sustenance
to continue creating.
The ideas of lack and plentitude are
also conveyed in poems about money. In "How We Save," parents teach
their son about saving and thrift, give him "a dollar / for doing a
household thing." But inside his piggy bank is also an IOU, "what it
cost / to fill the car and take him / where he wanted to go." The poem
ends with a visit to a park with a meadow where they lay in the grass, and the
son "blessed / it with a name—Place of Fresh / Butterfly
Milk." I love that the mother in this poem teaches the
child about finding abundance through being in nature, which mirrors the idea
in the poem "Three Tips for Inhabiting Our Material World" of "working
on a notion / of place" and creating a nest.
In "Special Money" the
mother is forced to use saved Bicentennial quarters to buy a gallon of milk,
giving the reader the powerful statement: "Nothing is so special it can't
/ be made bread." The poem "What it Means to Wait" contains a waitress whose purse is weighed down
with coins that she counts out "for a jug / of milk." In
"Offering," instead of money for the church collection, she offers
stamps, "a gift card for ice cream," and "a poem." In
"One Hundred Grand" she carries dollars "in this pouch I wear. /
The thinking is that the law / of attraction will kick in, and soon / I'll be
swarmed with greenbacks, ungainly as a mantis in flight."
Even though the title of the
collection is No More Milk, and many
of its poems examine scarcity, hunger, and need, they are also full of
abundance and hope. "Naming What Is" imagines a scene such as the biblical
Garden of Eden, where a man and a woman interact with the opulence of the natural world as
they name things:
...It
was all
so
pure then—they were incorruptible,
and
language moved between them
like
a beast, sweet and lumbering.
The idea of "naming" in
this poem beautifully parallels the son's naming a meadow in "How We Save,"
and also celebrates language, the spoken word, finding a voice, and creativity—other kinds of abundance threaded through these poems.
Besides writing about connection and
love between a mother and child, there are poems that feature love between
partners. In "Scat with Mourning Dove" the "I" of the poem
wakes to a dove's "syncopated song" and "a kiss, whisker sharp,
a body / warm against mine." I love the way the poet pairs the feeling of
a kiss (which I think of as soft) with "whisker sharp." This kind of
duality, this acknowledgement of love's complexity, is reflected in the way the
couple join in the bird's song, "yesterday's anger / reduced to syllables
in the air."
In "Before We Try 'I Love
You'" a couple is testing "the word obliquely. / On the phone,
buffered by a dozen states..." The center of the poem contains such a
striking image to convey the couple's conflicted feelings about making a deeper
commitment:
...But when we speak of each other,
something
catches the word at the trap door
of
our throats. It's like that egg
the
magician deposits in the cave of his ear,
then
draws whole from his mouth.
The egg is such a perfect image for
the beginning of things, for nourishment, for everything elemental. In
"Gathering Eggs" the narrator says "I'm here for their eggs, / a
thing they give easily, / and I get it: some months / entire paychecks are
taken / by snake-fingered hands." Such a powerful image of giving and
taking—the exchanges we make in life. Eggs also connect to the nest
imagery in several poems.
No
More Milk contains a central long poem in parts,
titled "Guided Meditation: Inventory" which is both an examination
and a celebration of the body, what I think of as self-love. We move slowly
from the ground up with poems subtitled "Feet," "Legs,"
"Hips," "Hand," "Arms," "Throat,"
"Head," and "Crown." The
poems begin with a direct address to the reader (as "you") to
"focus," "think," "consider," or "move your
attention" to a specific part of "your" body. In
"Feet" we see the poet's playfulness in the lines: "the feet—street urchins / who cleave to you." These lines are
also beautifully rhythmic, with the repeated long "e" sound. She
expresses such reverence and tenderness for the body, as in these lines in
"Legs:"
...Let the ankles,
graceful
as the neck
of
the Madonna,
flop
outward in repose.
In the poem "Hips" she says,
"They are broad," and uses longer lines to enhance this characteristic,
describing the hips with the following exquisite lines:
They
turn slowly like a beam from a lighthouse.
Imagine
you can open them to the light. You can't.
Your
pelvis is solid, the body's firm cradle.
Such surprise and beauty in the
first two lines followed by the startling statement, "You can't," which
emphasizes the reality of the body's limits. And yet, at the poem's end, it
reveals the comforting affirmation that "You can fill you. You can invite
/ others in. Any time you feel closed or hollow, / remember, there is a secret
door, a room." This sense of wonder at what our bodies can be and do, continues
in the poem "Arms" by simply stating, "Picture them moving /
along the gantry / of your shoulders. / They're snapping / a bedsheet. /
They're pulling two corners / together." In "Crown" she says,
"I think / hope lives there, or love—
/ things that have no place / near the body's rags and bruises, / its
churlishness and fear."
Besides acknowledging the wonders of
our bodies, these body inventory poems delve into the body's vulnerabilities.
In "Feet" she states "True, / the world will give up / its
carpet tacks, / its broken glass, / but promise the feet / you'll be
vigilant." In "Throat" she delves into the body's complexities,
describing the throat as "storehouse of the body's rage," and the
stunning image of how from your throat "truth skitters like a mole
rat." I'm reminded of the previously mentioned throat imagery in
"Before We Try 'I Love You.'"
The vulnerability in these body
poems is echoed and intensified in the poem "In Praise of the Body Broken
in Two," where the narrator experiences three days of pain. The poem ends with wonder, where she compares
the body to a cathedral:
...the
architecture of skin
and
bones—the arches and rose
windows,
buttresses, crockets, cusps.
This
place is so holy
you'd
have to leave your shoes
to
step inside.
The poet's handling of the body's vulnerability
goes even deeper, darker in four haunting poems in which she imagines ways of
dying—"by Bleeding," "by Bullet," "by
Water," and "by Fire." "Death by Bleeding" opens with:
You've
thought of it, but no:
the
wrist is a narrow, helpless thing,
and
you have traced its rivers
through
the skin. All morning
you've
been flexing your hand,
and
you've seen in those cords
a
dear throat, clearing.
This image of the throat and its
connection to our breathing, and our voice (especially relevant to a poet) was
echoed in earlier described poems, effectively setting up a repeated pattern
that resonates every time it appears. In "Death by Bullet," she says
"Alive, we can only conceive / of the searing.../ It blooms there, sudden
metal flower." "Death by Fire" opens with the chilling image
"At the base of the flame / there's a blue answer."
Many poems speak of the natural
world and its abundance and holiness—right
whales she imagines crossing her path, trees creaking in a way that she
describes as hearing them grow, a goldfinch returning to its mate "in the
usual undulating way: / some wingbeats, small plunge, // and again, again,
again." In "Taproot" she admires trees' resilience: "If
something blocks their light / they'll grow around it...They point themselves /
directly at their need."
The collection's last poem, titled
"Fruits," opens with the lines:
I want to say something
about the wild strawberries—
how they were all along the patch
and seemed new.
She goes on to describe their
beauty: "so bright, unusually
small. / We weren't sure what we were seeing—
/ even after I kneeled to touch one / and noted the surface studded / with
seeds." Then the poem turns, as the narrator reveals she's thinking about
these strawberries while she's rocking her baby, who's been crying for two
hours— "a tooth is trying to bloom / in his inconsolable
mouth." This baby, the mother rocking to console him, and his "inconsolable"
need mirrors the beginning poems so perfectly—and
these repeated ideas of abundance and scarcity, and of longing for beauty. The
poem and the collection end with the surprising, exquisite lines:
...the
baby flexes his back
and
lifts his mouth closer
to
my ear. The baby says beauty
is
ephemeral, and the earth
before
its fruits. Go ahead and write,
he
says—tell the people
what
you know. It's entirely possible
those
berries are already gone.
Yes, the poems in No More Milk tell us what Karen Craigo
knows of scarcity and abundance, giving and receiving, yearning and loving, vulnerability
and strength, beauty and holiness. These poems celebrate and rant about the
dualities and mysteries of being human. They resonate with genuine and complex
emotional intensity, and an irresistible tone of playfulness, kindness,
intimacy, and reverence. These poems will surprise, ground, and nourish you at
every turn.
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