DEAR ALL,
by Maggie Anderson
Published September, 2017
by Four Way Books
ISBN: 9781935536970
88 pages
reviewed by Barbara Sabol
What a delight to closely read and explore the poems in Maggie Anderson’s fifth and much-anticipated collection, DEAR ALL. Maggie has long been an anchoring presence in the Northeast Ohio poetry community, as founding director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, community ambassador, mentor. Now a Kent State Professor Emerita of English, living in North Carolina, Maggie’s influence is still deeply felt in this corner of Ohio, and most certainly with this reader. I first encountered Maggie as curator and host of the Wick Poetry Reading Series, and had the terrific fortune to be part of her poetry workshop at Chautauqua Institute’s writing festival in 2005―a goad to my own path in poetry.
This collection begins with an open-armed invitation from
the title poem; “Dear All,” an epistolary poem addressed to all of the “You’s”
closely or remotely or almost encountered. And the reader gladly walks through the door
which the poem throws opens, takes a comfortable seat and attends to the work
of a seasoned poet. In this first of three sections, the poems’ focus is the evolving
self in familial and societal orbits; the tone elegiac, reflective. A reliable “I” carries
through this section, the speaker/poet claiming the lead in these narratives. The following
poem, “Biography” is just that: in a dreamlike brushstroke, from the time of
birth through salient life events. One of the striking features of this piece,
and many of the other poems in the collection, is the juxtaposition of the specific, palpable―a thingness―against
abstraction, such as
.
. .
Family
arrives on the train in the rain
carrying leather grips and
hatboxes.
The
self blooms,
a
chrysalis of sorrow.
Here and throughout, there exists a kind of seesawing
of sharp focus and subconscious impression which infuses the work with that
delicious sensation of strangeness. In
that same poem:
I
eat rice from a red lacquer bowl,
Green
tea singes my tongue.
The
riderless horse leads the procession
Fever
carries me out of my body.
The elegiac poems are stunning. Mother, father, the
war poems, the griefs that define our perspective. Here, in its entirety, is “At
Fifty,” one of our most gorgeously moving motherloss poems:
At
Fifty
My mother died at fifty of
a beautiful word, leukemia.
Nine years earlier
in autumn, she gave birth to me
when the maples in the park
began to turn as they do now.
I don’t know how to walk here,
in the shifting space no meanings fill.
I have outlived her.
I enter this foreshortened field,
wildly unmothered still.
My mother died at fifty of
a beautiful word, leukemia.
Nine years earlier
in autumn, she gave birth to me
when the maples in the park
began to turn as they do now.
I don’t know how to walk here,
in the shifting space no meanings fill.
I have outlived her.
I enter this foreshortened field,
wildly unmothered still.
Poems of personal loss mingle with collective grief, as
enacted by the war poems that dominate the second section of the book. The poet’s
engagement with universal loss through images that shake the reader awake to
atrocity is evident here. “This is the least I can do―/to remember the war in
my books,” the poet states in the last two lines of “Beautiful War.”
These poems deliver a soft gut punch: references to
the holocaust, Civil War, unceasing turmoil in the Mideast are contextualized
in the speaker’s reflections, her memories, at times a lucid dreaming state
when our deepest truths bubble to the surface. For example, in “The Sleep Writer,” a fragmented
form mimics the blending of real and
subconscious images in that half-awake state: “Lovely afternoon. The firing
squad./Bottles lined up in the sun./Dahlias. Men in uniform. Daffodils.”
A blending of multi-sensory images of nightmare/surfacing
to wakefulness also weave through “Asleep still, I rise:”
. . .
Muffle
of chopper blades
Then
sharper red sky, white sand
Choked
engines flash and chemical singe
In contrast is the calm of the sleep walker’s
immediate environment: “. . .a sweet breeze from the opened window/inside the
safe rooms of the house.”
The speaker, here and throughout, expresses a profound empathy with the oppressed, the target, whether human or four-legged animal. In “Cleaning the Guns,” she states, “but really it was the helplessness/I couldn’t get around. The deer absolutely still, alert,/one shot & death. I couldn’t do that.”
The speaker, here and throughout, expresses a profound empathy with the oppressed, the target, whether human or four-legged animal. In “Cleaning the Guns,” she states, “but really it was the helplessness/I couldn’t get around. The deer absolutely still, alert,/one shot & death. I couldn’t do that.”
War as an internalized struggle is depicted in the
poet’s father poems, most strikingly in “Note
from My Father.” The figure of the father in these poems is a literate and
worldly man who chafes against the aphasia that has stolen his language. In a startling
image rendered the more poignant by the daughter’s struggle to decipher his message
is a description of her father’s efforts at speech, “to say something he
thought was clever:”
He stuttered and stabbed at words.
Like a horse trapped in a forest,
he lifted his head and threw it back,
snorted and cleared his throat.”
The poems of loss and battles of one kind or another
are counterbalanced by the wit of a handful of poems infused with a more musing
tone. In the third section, for example, the speaker in “In Real Life" explores
the other lives “I seem to have imagined myself into:”
In
real life, I am planning a new career. I imagine
for
myself a small congregation of gay Episcopalians
somewhere
in the Midwest, in a town not know for
tolerance,
but respectful, even a bit in awe of
anything
that passes for style. I am their priest,
their
good shepherd, and all my flock play
musical
instruments and give amusing dinner parties.
In another poem in that last section, “Waiting for
Jane Austen in Walnut Creek, Ohio, at the end of the twentieth century,” time
and situations are blithely bent to allow poet and Jane to exchange centuries
and circumstance:
. . .Then I was the one
in the eighteenth century,
in the General Store,
examining racks of buttons and spools
of thread beside the
rakes and ropes as thick as thighs.
Jane was tearing down
the highway at 65 m.p.h., a wild Beast
in her worn leather
covers and braid of a bookmark,
her apparatus of happiness fully intact.
The work in this final section of the book ranges in
style and subject, and abounds with vivid description. In “The Thing We
Can’t Forget,” perseveration “chokes the imagination/like kudzu. . .” and the lushness of the natural world is made otherworldly in “A
Blessing,” which opens with “Translucent braid gelled to silver at first
light,/the valley’s work, the white, the shining.” And in “The Map,” a metaphor
for blossoming tree blunts the hard edge of a singular pain of a parent’s dying:
. . .
. . .
I
wish I could tell him that this week the tiny
spoons
of the dogwood blossoms turned
and
drew music up from the drenched ground,
The breadth of the mind’s associative workings
is suggested via abstract yet accessible imagery and startling simile in the
poem, “In the Rubble of the World.” Fractured lineation further animates the cascading
succession of surreal impressions in this
powerful piece:
.
. .
Sun
and the wicked noises
march
through the air of the brain:
the
wounded are never clean―
like
aubergines
cut
open and left to absorb the atmosphere
the layered
opening of dying roses on a wide table
green
leaves backlit against the flames
lint
clotted in the heavy drape
The book’s closing poem, “And then I arrive at the
powerful green hill,” enacts the gesture of letting go all the bitter and sad
things laid out in the preceding poems:
. . .
I have brought everything I've left undone--
letters and resolutions, almost loves,
hard grudges--to give to the wind that takes them up,
tosses them down, down until
my hands are empty and I am as thin and light as a girl.
This poem beautifully bookends “Biography,” at the
start of the book, which begins, “Born, I was born./In sweat and tears I lay on
a flowered blanket/. . .My mind is clear as polished glass.”
The great strength of these personal poems, aside from
their technical mastery, is the intensely private made public: most readers
have experienced significant loss at some age, have felt undone by the great tragedies
in our lifetimes, have pondered the workings of the body, the mind, relative to
life’s larger questions; these poems offer words for those profound emotions
and perceptions. We are moved by the poet’s
disarming vulnerability laid bare in poems like “Ordinary Morning,” where the pain
of grief and that of one exiled is without boundary:
. . .
I can imagine hunger,
quavery
Emptiness of nothing to
eat and not knowing when.
Cut off, amputated in a
cold basement with no news,
Sharp static, a green
transistor radio
O mother and father I
prematurely grieved,
Where are you now that I
need to lose you?
. . .
Of the myriad lyric qualities in DEAR ALL―the tangible detail underlying clear descriptive
narrative, the range of style and forms, the deep bow to influential poets―is
the clear and authentic voice of Maggie Anderson. The poet’s voice is
straightforward, unembellished, genuine. There is a wonderful story teller’s
element in this compelling collection,
which settles us in our reading chair, to listen, to ponder, to imagine.
Anderson’s lyric voice is one that is authentic, plain-spoken, so as to be
nearly audible; a voice that resonates well after the poems are read. The poet
writes to her readers via the book’s title, invites us into her image- and language-rich world. And for this
reader, who has long-admired Maggie Anderson’s work, the invitation is most
welcome.
Maggie Anderson is the author of four previous books of poetry: Windfall: New and Selected Poems, A Space Filled with Moving, Cold Comfort, and Years that Answer. She has co-edited several thematic anthologies, including A Gathering of Poets, a collection of poems read at the 20th anniversary commemoration of the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, as well as Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and After the Bell: Contemporary American Prose about School. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia councils on the arts, and the Ohioana Library Award for contributions to the literary arts in Ohio. The founding director of the Wick Poetry Center and of the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press, Anderson is a professor emerita of English at Kent State University and now lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
reviewed by Barbara Sabol
reviewed by Barbara Sabol
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