A Review of Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic

Three deep bows to the editors of this rainbow, this cornucopia, this star-studded cast of gifted poetry makers. They did not trick out the poetry with fancy fonts or graphics; the words speak for themselves and that feels right.

At least one poet had the virus, some are old, some young, some write in pairs, one has been translated from Korean. One displays show-don’t-tell photographs. On page after page, they invite the reader to view this pandemic through a renewing prism. COVID-19 will be fuel for all kinds of art in the future; kudos to these poets for writing insightfully about something so immediate.

Each poet deserves to be experienced as to style, format, historicity, influences, philosophy, and more, but a book review must, regretfully, skip through this rich trove with but a few brush strokes for each. Perused at your leisure. There is so much to think about, so much to savor. If you think you know this pandemic, think again.

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s first people’s heritage thumps through his poems. The archetypal buffalo brings us back to the real, the power, the spiritual bedrock.

Gentle heart you are,
                                    I would say
Sumo-sweetness, the prairie breeze
So bracing it recalls your soul
To times you ambled in amber citrus fields…

Sumo-sweetness, what a way to describe the heavy, powerful, surprisingly lithe buffalo!

Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung, teamed up. Their lush language encompasses all living matter, from the moment when creatures emerged from the swamp to today, from here to Papua, New Guinea. One poem stops to witness “the way a coyote or band of raccoons/might wander out of Central Park/up Fifth Avenue & climb the MET steps.” Here. Now. The pandemic world is just one of their many, but “Don’t worry, love, there’s nothing in the world of mirrors that is not you looking back…”

Stephanie Strickland’s poems are notional.

Belief
                                    in
The existence of other human
beings as        such
is 
love

The punky, punchy groove climbs into the reader’s head and bounces around until it lands someplace, and you say, “Yeaahhhhhh.”

Mary Jo Bang’s poems creep in at a petty pace: today, today, today. “Today I thought time has totally stopped. There is no/foreseeable future and the present so overwhelms the past/that it hardly exists.” She presents Purgatory, neither here nor there, a dreadful aloneness. Her head is “Kafka’s crawl space in/which something alive is always burrowing.” “The world is too much,” she writes, “too much with me.”

Shane McCray’s poems feel like they fell off the back of a truck. He tosses off his observations in delightful, unexpected, well researched detail. While skateboarding, he is in a “city where there isn’t/A city anymore.” He inhabits his physical self “as if my body were  haunting my body.” Things are not as they were, as they seem, or even as he can properly understand them, which gives him a chance to become something new. His poems reveal great intelligence but little salvation, perhaps some guideposts to understanding.

Ken Chen is discursive, fluent, erudite, political. He sees out today’s Apocalypse unfolding “under the sallow iPhone lamp…Shout over the police who have prohibited even breathing…the planet spools out its fraying thread of days…where they threw hoses at prisoners and led them into the burning forest…” Chen’s recitation of horrors flows on, from the obscene photos of the dead boy on the beach in Bodrun to some cute deaths involving Harry Potter and Minnie Mouse. He exhorts the reader to remember them: “I inspected each name and mounted them in the bezels of the text.” There is a surprise ending. Chen snaps his fingers, “what we remember/replaces what remains, the lost are soon forgotten, and We hold hands, we run,/we leap into the waters.” May it be so.

J. Mae Barizo offers the prayer that “…the light/will lick and lick the damage clean. That it is not/ruin already.” She ushers the reader through first poems filled with flowers and light, into a place where the prognosis is poorer. Her metaphors are delightful: “outside the pedestrians gleamed like pinpricks, or listening to lovers/sleep, breathing/like monster trucks.” Her spirit cannot resist hope despite evidence to the contrary, and the reader is taken on a soft-loving ride through the ruins.

Dora Malech tours the headlines of this dire time, writing as if in a diary. She reminds us of the little girl who drowned on her father’s back as he tried to cross the river to America, of the penguins starving in the winter, torahs. She writes “I had waded into the Information and come back dragging a/haul of names. Still soaked, they marked a trail in the sand/behind me as I pulled them from the River.” Malech is trying to keep up her hope while suffering in the strange, unexpected ways that we are all suffering.

Smack dab in the middle of the book comes B. A. Van Sise with his photographs. A welcome visual break. They are evocative, not pretty. Why is that man the only one not wearing a mask? Why is that other man clutching his child with such sad determination? Hail to that essential worker, serving in the boring convenience store to save us. Thank you, editors Kristina Marie Darling and Jeffrey Levine, for including these photos among the poetry.

Jon Davis is an old man with nothing to lose. Might as well tell the truth as he sees it. He confronts the pandemic and learns what he already knows, only more so. Life is an uncertain enterprise. He mentions the “layers of history”, recalling the work of another elderly poet, Stanley Kunitz and his poem The Layers. Such is impermanence—layers of good on bad, rich on poor, happy upon unhappy. He rewards us with humor: “we remembered the ‘kids’ were thirty-something…speaking a language we didn’t recognize at all.” And how about this, “the skunks ambled through the arugula like mental patients.” Favorite metaphor: “…music seeping into the lobby like radiation.”

Lee Young-Ju’s work is translated by Jae Kim, and bravo to him. It couldn’t have been easy. If Salvador Dali had written poetry, it might be like this, full of trompes d’oeils, flippant about the rules, running through a place that is familiar but not like anything you’re ever seen.

Lee is Korean, and her poems have sieved through a different history, a different culture. As in much Asian art, there is no attempt to keep time and space in perspective. The poetry is made of images, smells, wind on the skin. “Languages are afloat, like feathers,” or “What’s this breeze that has leaked out of my soul?,” or “Girls gather in the alley and talk without moving their lips.” The reader can see, hear, and feel it, and the rhythm and pungency carry her along, as if she were in the blind tunnel at the amusement park. Though some images are of wreckage and despair, they’re still yummy. “I remain in the whirlwind and continue to be thrown away.”

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is another prose poet. Reading her work is like going to the spa; every touch, smell, warmth, and chill is palpable, meaningful, and healing. She addresses the pandemic in its atomic expression, taking us through the near death feelings when engulfed by a 103-degree fever. She shows us the virus from inside the body of a person suffering from it. She wonders, “Will I come through this if my body does not come with me?” She honors Tamisha, the forensic technician who places daffodils on body bags in the hospital morgue. In a bow to another aspect of our times, she remembers the Black lives lost. She steps back from the atomic in the end to comment, “The virus rears in sunlight, devouring bodies that will not mask, separate, isolate, listen. The virus is the arrow of the nation’s ego.”

A.Van Jordan’s poetry skims along accessible, meaningful. He encounters quarantined, sheltering people and “I ask them/and—is it possible, for the first time?—/I truly wanna know” echoing Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s recent op ed that pleads with us to ask each other in this perilous time, “How are you?” Jordan picks and chooses his vocabulary and his allusions. He “hangs out,” talks of “swagger,” then he turns to Prospero, Caliban, Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare. His comparison of the words of Queen Elizabeth I and Donald Trump is a walloping riposte to those who dismiss racism and repression. Yes, this has been going on a for a long time. He quotes Langston Hughes, “I dream a world.” The juxtaposition of the high-fallutin’ with the everyday jolts the reader into acceptance of universality. Can’t keep this man down. “[.]..we continue long into night/into the coming day, a Soul Train of revolt/lining rural routes, and filling streets/in our cities with dance.”

Maggie Queeney writes “Inside the Patient is another Patient, perfect, and one/size smaller. Inside that Patient is another, and another,/perfect.” A poetic symphony of compassion for the suffering, the lost hopes, the destruction of what should have been. The patient is delivered “Into the hands of others, their palms slick with/alcohol or cloaked in latex in a blue chosen/for its quantified calming effect…” Queeney is writing what she knows, catching fragments of reality, of truth, and laying them on a silver platter for us.

She kneads the subject of “Patient” into many shapes, each enlightening, the words lovely and clear. “The Patient’s Book of Saints,” “The Patient has a History of Medical Treatment,” “The Narrative Arc of the Patient,” and so on. Not only does the situation of the Patient change, but the structure of her poems changes as she paints each with a different brush. If Queeney hasn’t been trained as a nurse, she sure feels like one, detail-oriented, caring, effective, sure.

Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito are co-authors who sink into the senses, colors, and impressions of life, but yearn for certainty, for the power to protest. Theirs is a record of the isolation of the pandemic, but they also bring along the rising waters of climate change and the rife injustices that remain unaddressed. Ruin awaits. So what do you do?

Dusk summons me home with its sapphire curfew.
Do you want to know how I do it? I expect nothing.
And then, and then, the bright surprise of your arrival.

A poet cannot give up hope; it is her substance, her living. Who would bother to distill the essence of things if not to inspire others to rise above themselves and save us?

Denise Duhamel jumps right in: “I saw the best minds of my generation (i.e., Fauci, Birx)/Undermined by Trump….” This poem is titled “Howl,” a reference, perhaps an homage, to Allen Ginsberg. Just when you thought you’d heard the first draft of history told in every possible way, she comes up with a new way. She condenses the tiresome facts into an energy pill, then repeats: canceled doctors’ visits, essential workers, no visits to mom, masks. Duhamel pummels the reader again and again. “2020/always sounded to me like a sci fi year/but now it is here with a pandemic predicted/by both scientists and sci fi.” That doesn’t sound like poetry, but in Duhamel’s hands, it is. Here is our Samuel Pepys. Here’s the bam bam bam, and then bam, bam, bam, of indignity, sacrifice, loneliness, helplessness, the revitalization of Nature as everybody stays home, the lies, the needless death, the brutality—read on.

Rich Barot is the perfect final act, a series of effortless (lol, as if), funny, insightful, touching poem-paragraphs full of images, turns of phrase, palpable reality. Here is the last of them:

During the pandemic, I listened. Things hummed their tunes.
The pear. The black sneaker. The old-fashioned thermometer.
The stapler with the face of a general from Eastern Europe.
Once, my father confessed he had taken the padlock from his
Factory locker and clipped it on the rail of a footbridge at the
Park. He had retired. The park was near his house. Each time
He went there, I imagined him feeling pleased, going to work.

*

This review is but a tiny taste of a novel and enchanting work. Keep it at your bedside for a laugh, a tear, a thought, an inspiration.