An Unclouded Eye: A Review of IN OTHER DAYS by Roger Craik

Whether it’s the sprawling oak of a contemporary Odyssey, or a mere seedling like Stevie Smith’s Croft, a poem must earn its right to the name. Readability—that is, a rhythm of sorts to carry you through—is a given, along with originality and expressiveness; but for the thing to have substance, surely two qualities are essential: it should have integrity, it must have heart.

Roger Craik, Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University, Ohio, knows this; knows his craft inside-out. The poems here are not dramatic, not intended to startle or outrage; they are not clever, tricksy poems delivered from under a mortarboard, nor are they prissily poetic or drowning in molasses. Disappointingly perhaps to thrill-seekers, polemic-eaters and those of a righteous or overly sentimental disposition, you will find here only poems that are considered and quietly commanding. There is an unobtrusive artistry at work in the construction of them, a building up of colour, detail and honest feeling. They will come back to you again and again; not to bite you, but rather to whisper glories in your ear, understated glories of remembrance and love.

Craik was born in England, in the county of Leicestershire which was, and is still, largely rural. The character of the place is effectively summoned in the early poems by the naming of villages—Peatling Magna, Peatling Parva—just as people from his boyhood are fixed in time simply by their names; wonderfully resonant names like Marjorie Marlow, Brownie Neave and, magnificently, Florrie Mist. Local history, personalities and events are casually dropped into the mix for detail and atmosphere, and to give us a real feel for the environment in which Craik grew up. Nostalgia can be precarious for a poet, it can all too easily soften the senses and distort the truth, resulting in a poem lacking backbone, lacking interest to all but the writer. But Craik is far too good a poet to fall into that particular trap; his is an unclouded eye reflecting experiences that are, perhaps, in some way common to us all. I’m thinking of the poem “Lewes,1966” where he is playing alone:     

The taut green
tennis ball spinning from my fingertip,
spanking the hot patio, half-volleying
up against the brickwork and

soaring in the sky all over England

to clasp itself in my palm
again and again and again.

The repetitive, trance-like throwing of a ball by a youngster contemplating the coming of a world of danger and possibility, represented by a vast sky, is a nice image skillfully presented.  

He goes on to recall a series of quiet moments of revelation, testament and emotional impact in a way reminiscent of someone pulling over in the car to take a moment, to reacquaint himself with those things that have contributed to his character; a sort of reset, I suppose. Among a fascinating miscellany, we learn of his travels in Turkey and of the detached voice of an old man calling on his god while walking through reeds in the mist, and of a moment of loneliness in Romania. There is an elegantly composed deliberation on the gymnast Olga Korbut competing in the ill-fated 1972 Olympics in Munich, and a lyrical hymn to Burrough Hill, with delicate reference to his self-realization. Craik moved to America in 1991, and “New Year’s Eve,1999” is an engaging contemplation of the old country and his ancestry peppered with fragments of family history, and ending with the exquisite “The last of the sun / is crimsoning into the world.” I was taken by a curious poem telling of an outsider moving in to the village and complaining of cocks crowing and cows (described wonderfully by a local as chorus girls) mooing, which contrasts with a rather sad consideration of an adolescence fueled by the songs of Leonard Cohen, his voice “graveling down the years”. 

That phrase prompts me to offer, without context, another of the author’s pleasing illustrations: this time his description of the pronoun “we” in one of his pieces:

Plump gelatinous
capsule of a syllable
smooth as halibut liver oil.

If that little aside doesn’t define a real poet, then I’m not sure what does.

Above all there is a subtlety, a hesitancy almost in these poems. A sense of the unidentifiable, of something behind the veil, is presented time and time again, and it’s a device, if you can call it that, which is hugely effective. This quality of suggestion is nicely demonstrated in the poem “That Early Evening” which sees the poet walking with a girlfriend along a disused railway line in his native Leicestershire fifteen years ago. He can still picture the cows and their calves lumbering over, these guileless creatures at the gate:

each one’s brimming luminous gaze
drawn to me, drawn to me, betrayed.

It’s oddly touching, and the inventive but entirely convincing language (the cows “in a jostling hotness, nostrilling hard”) catches the moment and enhances the mood beautifully.

This holding back gives way, as it were, only in the last lines of an affecting poem about his mother’s illness. He reflects one Christmas on the number of cigarettes she has smoked over these thirty years, and those she has yet to smoke. How they are:  

… slowly killing her, in the other room,
while I’m half-drunk on gin, writing this in tears.  

We get to hear more about his mother in the final poem of the collection which deals with her subsequent death and funeral in an almost conversational but deeply tender manner. It’s opening lines are a remarkable summing up of mourning:  

This is no grief I have ever known. 

It is as if
a child has drawn a wandering unbroken line

through all the days
I am still to live.

The honest simplicity of the words only serves to make them more meaningful, more entirely apt. They embody those very qualities mentioned at the top of this review.

Long after the work of more showy poets loses its sheen; after the cliches have worn themselves thin and the clever conceits have surrendered their fragile appeal, these nuanced and dare I say it relatable poems, with their thoughtful and sympathetic grace, will stay long in the memory. In Other Days is a finely drawn and unhurried remembrance magnifying the tangential and hinting at the quietly momentous. It is an impressive piece of work.

Sketches

An angler delivering fish
into glorious day
draws them down listlessly;
his cigarette smoke fading over yellow irises
bending into a mist.

---

A tarmac raker straightens from his work
to lean into a breeze and pick out blessings:
atavistic phantoms like snow unseen
over a backwater;
a world away beyond the cones, the heat,
the endless bullying of engines . . .

---

May flower falling to a dirty stream
stirs the bones of an idea:
a note in the mythology
of someone looking on,
someone seemingly forgotten.

---

Author’s Note: The poems were first published in a now defunct poetry magazine/anthology called Decanto in 2012.

An Ever Present Love: A Review of The Breath by Cindy Savett

It is said that to lose a child is to lose the future. But just a few pages in, this collection of poems, these illuminated memories and imaginings convinced me that Cindy Savett’s daughter was not lost to her when she died at the age of eight all those years ago. As long as Rachel “… lingers, sounds out / the curvatures of my breath / with her phantom tongue…” then she is as real as ever, her all too brief existence immortalised in the souls of those who loved her. And with that love, you feel their future is assured.

The Breath is a series, an arrangement of stuttering emotion and almost mythical imagery summoning the poet’s departed child and relating her sorrow in an even and considered way which only magnifies its intensity. It is both a quiet release of anguish and a heightened recollection, skillfully composed and with an overwhelming honesty that urges you on to discover more about Rachel and her abiding presence.

A mother’s love is a mother’s love and is unfathomable, but of course the whole family carries the burden of such a devastating impact on their lives, each experiencing and coping with it in their own way. Savett gives us fleeting impressions of their responses, including the son who “… grips the whispers / around him, listens for the dead child and the stories / she once told him.” and the surviving daughter “clothed in the needles of old love.” Her husband Rob features prominently throughout; his strength and support, the unfailing and unconditional love he provides, as well as his own grief, are recorded touchingly. These four lines, from the poem “Of Rob,” are a nice illustration of just that:

Rob, iron weaver,
binds us down to the dirt,
loosens the acres
inside my breath.

As individuals, as a couple, as a household, Cindy, Rob, Alison and Sean are necessarily reconstructed by force of circumstance; their history, their very DNA adjusted to cope since Rachel’s leaving; since they:

… were a house
with sinking beams, set apart
from the many.

Within these pages, the work of a born poet, are what might be called momentary poems, poems of the here and now like entries in a diary which document Rachel’s reappearances over time, along with meditations and a kind of philosophical searching. The whole is a dignified lament and a potent, a near hypnotic insistence of the child’s continued presence. What appeals is the utter artlessness of the poetry: there is nothing contrived or mannered here; everything is natural, and the desired aim of conveying the heartache and the love is achieved purely through sincerity and candour. Every poem in the collection succeeds in doing just that. Consider the following, called “Faded, Rachel, Gone”:

When you fled
I threw out the bedclothes
and your shuddering scent, you

were the watchgirl who lay beside me
and split dawn’s light from the dark.

Me, aimless
dwarfed by your single last gasp.

There is a guileless sensitivity, an unselfconscious openness in these lines, where each word feels natural and right, serving to highlight the awful reality of the moment. That “shuddering scent” is almost unbearable.

Cindy Savett, who teaches poetry workshops in psychiatric hospitals, has previously published a full-length collection of poetry about Rachel, Child in the Road, so why another now, fourteen years later? The answer is abundantly clear in each of these manifestations of the girl’s continued reality. Rachel still breathes, still visits her mother, her father, the unfortunate siblings starting out in life with both the blessing and the pain of their sister’s memory, and Savett is eager to preserve these moments. Perhaps even obliged to do so. I can imagine that it took a good deal of thought deciding to share them with an unknowing public, but I applaud her courage in doing so; indeed, I am grateful for it.

The sweet memories, the comforting reminders and the very act of realising her daughter’s existence still, are positive and are generously sprinkled throughout, but unsurprisingly the tone is overwhelmingly that of sadness, a quiet melancholy no better expressed perhaps than in this rather piteous poem titled “Sublime”:

I track you, my endlessly dying daughter,
for the shadow in your breath, ragged prize
drawn from your mouth to mine,

and pin you shaken and pulsing
to the dirt. I stumble over
pieces of your gray iron coat

to my hour that howls,
my burying shovel twisted, my home
overrun by your hollow eyes.

This collection, without doubt the most affecting I’ve read for a very long time, is divided into what the author terms incantations, (and I can’t think of a better word to describe the ritualistic nature of the language used, the repetition, the weight attached to certain images) the last of which is but a single poem. It’s an intense summing-up of Rachel and consists of a series of epithets describing her “used-to-be-girl”, each followed by a figurative finger to the lips and a plaintive “silence”. It’s a prayer, an invocation, a quite beautiful calling out to her absent child.   

It’s not my place as a reviewer to comment directly on the personal tragedies and consolations of a poet, although it’s almost impossible in this case not to, but it is my job to evaluate the work resulting from them. Do the poems convey the reactions to those experiences in such a way as to draw the reader in, to give the reader insights, revelations of bare truth, that a more prosaic recording could not? Well, in respect of this equally powerful and tender collection, I can answer emphatically yes. Cindy Savett has let us in on her and her family’s grief, their strength, their togetherness with good grace and astonishing candour, and I believe that, as readers, we are all the better for it.

Poetry With Bite, Rohan Chhetri’s Starkly Honest Collection: Lost, Hurt, or In Transit Beautiful

This is the work of a serious poet, let that be said from the start, and a seriously good poet at that. Skilled in the art, certainly, with a feel for structure and pace, but more than that he is a poet with an absorbing story to tell, and the means to tell it in an honest and forthright way. You’ll find no whimsical reflections here, or first-world obsessions escalated to tragedy; rather, you will come across the real thing: poetry alive with originality and striking images; poetry with bite. 

A Nepali-Indian writer now resident in the US, Rohan Chhetri’s work is weighted with place and tradition. A chaotic world of violence and hardship, superstition and familial love is introduced graphically in the first few lines of the opening poem, and continues throughout with legend and hard reality effectively combined to illustrate day to day existence in environments of conflict and poverty. We very soon encounter a shaman arriving in a village blowing a trumpet made from a suicide’s hollow shinbone—music robbed from the grave; people making love as electrocuted crows smoke above power lines; a relative waterboarded and force-fed earth “until it plugs his windpipe”. These are just a taste of what to expect from a series of almost matter of fact, though expertly drawn, depictions of a world a million miles from the West’s perceived ideas of injustice or privation.

Chhetri’s skill is evident in the various poetic forms he adopts; some conventional, others more esoteric, but each successful in conveying his ideas. Actually, Ideas is perhaps the wrong word, because what really drives the poetry is memory: memory translated, shaped and re-imagined, presented as a kind of mythical autobiography. In the wonderfully descriptive “BORDERSONG” for example, we learn of a boyhood home downwind of a mosque, a temple, a grimy brothel; downwind of the severed heads of Liberation Front leaders hung from the branch of a guava tree; downwind of a peaceful kingdom’s border. We hear of a doomed affair in New Delhi, and the author’s fear of running into his lover again in this vast city, which becomes too small for two; and we are told, in a beautiful but deeply sad poem, of his meeting an old school friend, not seen for many years, outside a monastery in Phuentsholing. Sebastian, sitting red-eyed on a cold stone bench, is a declining ghost of the boy he once knew, where just looking into his face:

“…was a vertiginous drop down
the cool dark of an abandoned well, & him
a thin shade at the bottom among the bones.”

It is a touching piece, adeptly handled.

His memory is used to good effect in a particularly fine poem, “THE INDIAN RAILWAY CANTICLE”, which colourfully brings to life a three-day journey home he experienced as a boy. Rattling through a land blighted by drought, religion, fratricide…, with “the sun bearing down infernal since dawn, breathing fissures into the earth”, he writes of a farmer’s suicide, of avoiding the unwanted attention of hijras and witnessing an unpleasant incident at a station. There are hucksters, lepers, “language changing every hundred kilometres” and all the clamour and stench of a crowded train, relieved momentarily by “fragrant mist rising off harvest hay in the morning”. Reading this short poem, you might feel you get a better idea of the country than any amount of travel guides could ever tell you.

There is a rather nice lyrical interlude which tempers, like a cooling draught, the heat and harsh realism of the preceding in “FISH CROSS THE BORDER IN RAIN”. It sees Chhetri and his father going down to the river on an old scooter, with the elder singing because “the breeze makes him young in the face.” They watch on as men with lead batteries tied around their necks wade chest high into the water to stun the fish and scoop them, belly up, into nets, only for them to:

“wake older dreaming brief new lives huddled
in a foreign prison gasping at each other’s
gills blinded like a sack of mirrors”

Surely that simile is unimprovable.

If one or two of the references in this shortish collection seem a little bewildering to the average reader, (and I’m thinking here predominantly of the details of political unrest in the state of West Bengal) then this is more than made up for by the absolute transparency of the sense, the feeling inherent in any particular piece. I might have said senses, because you could almost have been present at the scenes portrayed, taking in the very air of the village, the city, the countryside, such is the descriptive power employed. This is a poet at the top of his game: inventive and candid, assured but not showy, expressive without resorting to the lazy, the easy choice of word that comes unthinkingly to mind. These qualities are never more apparent than in the quietly provoking “TOWARDS SOME DARK”. It begins:

“They came at dawn, three angels
in jumpsuits, & felled the two ash trees
in front of the neighbour’s house”

and goes on to describe how a patch of blue suddenly released gives rise to the thought that this is how we arrive at clarity—“through some clearing of the living.” The idea brings to mind memories of his grandfather dying:

“…pleading through
the final hours to please pull the fucking shroud
off his head. It was the yellow mosquito

net hung low above the bed
where he lay hallucinating, furious
we were trying to ease him towards some dark.”

And with the trees gone, the wind “flits on our porch like a young unremembered thing”; but “it has lost something, & doesn’t know it, sniffing about the heavy stink of sawdust & brine”

“…like it has stepped on so much blood
drying small wounds.”

There’s something about this piece which is really quite affecting in the way its imagery and sentiment come back, entirely unbidden, again and again. It’s a quality born essentially of truthfulness.

I had thought to open this critique with a detailed appreciation of a remarkable poem which struck me on first reading, and even more so on subsequent visits, as one of the finest I have reviewed for quite some time. “LAMENTATION FOR A FAILED REVOLUTION” is a bitter account of a “long summer of bullets” punctuated by episodes of such brutality, such shocking wantonness, as to be barely credible. I was tempted to quote freely from the text, but random lines would be quite inadequate to convey the bleakness of the whole. I will content myself merely with the following, a summing-up perhaps, or judgement on that unhappy period: “Every failed revolution is a child / learning the edge of himself / every revolution is a child / grown before fire”; and urge you to read this poem in full to appreciate the desolation within the piece, and the mastery with which it is related.

Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a grown-up collection; a considered, a philosophical evocation of a culture and a history little known outside of its borders. It is an engrossing, if often troubling picture deserving of the widest audience.

A Review of Lord Baltimore by Peter Ramos

Poets all too often forget their responsibility to give the reader at least a chance of making sense of their work, or they choose to be deliberately opaque to disguise a lack of meaning, of purpose.  Let us then give thanks for this fine collection by Peter Ramos, associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, which offers Intelligent, original and accessible poems that awaken the senses and reignite one’s enthusiasm for verse. 

The book opens with a thoughtful little piece, dedicated to his children, about the end of a summer day; a day defined as “an open melon / thrumming with insects and minutes” which at night, inverted and reflected in the water, is “completely awake and truer than time.” There’s a lovely sense here of magnanimity in the heavens. It’s a gentle introduction to a series of poems which gather pace and vitality: qualities which are nowhere better expressed than in the title poem. In twenty-three parts and spread over sixteen pages, it is ambitious and various, never once flagging in interest or readability. It tells of a young man and his entirely unromantic existence as a would-be writer in the city of Baltimore.

In the first of numberless studios he has high expectations of high art and “green bohemian chatter”, with rusty industrial landscapes as the backdrop to his idealism. But the reality is somewhat different — the heat, the peeling plaster, the “accumulations of dandruff, the dead skin of decades” forcing him out to the street “with a gathering unbearable thirst”. Money is short, and he takes on dead-end jobs to pay the rent, such as painting a porch, or working at a sewage treatment plant where his boss has a steel rod in his back, and is afraid that a lightning strike might “solder my asshole shut.” He drinks too much; he dines on canned tuna and a six pack, and comes home to dust clumps and mice droppings, hearing his mother over the phone asking “in a tiny, wavering voice: are you okay?”  He finds companionship and sex with a girl who could not love him — nor he her:

. . . both of us 
sweating, furiously holding on
to each other in our twenties.

and goes on to consider: 

How we shone in that place
then, freshly devirgined, stars pulsed and slow

to go out.
How pretty now when you blur your eyes:

green jewelry glittering down

black glass, crackling
as it fades to cinder, to shadow —
trash.

Beautiful. I could quote endlessly from this poem. It’s quite an achievement to depict someone alone, small and terrified and out of step with the world, with a combination of strong imagery, wit and honesty, and which asks for neither pity or approbation; which so thoroughly captures the life of one who could say:

Here’s to you, Lord Baltimore, not Poe. I’m yours
truly, sunk, un-publishable, a mere scribbler
bon vivant, my glasses cracked & knocked
askew. By noon, I’m just another
dipshit local drunk.

Such a sense of failure pervades the piece. At last, after questioning himself and his existence among the empty factories and “smokestacks, chemical sludge, the sunset bruised with propane” he decides he has had enough and:

I got out.
Walked for years, the flames
eating my skin
less and less, dumb and dazed,
afraid but steadying, toward no place
I’d ever known.  

It’s a wonderful piece of work, seeded with lyrics from Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin,” to lend atmosphere, and snippets of historical fact about Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, to add perspective and contrast. It is most unusual, in my experience at least, to come across a poem that is quite so thoroughly engaging.

But there is so much more to admire here; so much variety and energy and colour: from a lyrical, if discretely troubling hike in Virginia without books or medicine, watches or spirits:

just musical gnat-clouds
over the brook, the light-dazzle
on water’s skin
and wet pebbles

to an anecdotal piece on teenage rebellion and bravura summed up in a hundred fizzing words. From a pool-side scene in Hawaii featuring women in almost nothing but anklets, lipstick and nail polish who are, and have always been, wholly out of reach, to the simmering discontent of a group of working-class men on a hot fourth of July. Accessible maybe, but these poems lack nothing in depth or meaning, and have that rarest of qualities — they merit further visits.  

There’s a solidity of detail within these poems; an absence of obscurity or blind alleys. A Firebird takes the place of an abstract noun, a Flying V for an adverb. You’ll find Catholic iconography and ranch houses; high-jinx and hangovers; mildew blooming in the bathroom and astronomical fire. This sort of construction, this directness, can sometimes be far more efficient in summoning a memory or evoking an emotion than a more reticent, a more delicate approach; and that, after all, is what being a poet is all about. This is not to say there isn’t subtlety here — there is allusion and metaphor aplenty — but there is also real content; something to get your teeth into. Who is not taken by a description of American mothers as “sewn up & impersonal, lost in daytime cable”, or a night of love in a jacked-up GTO by a dumpster, after which “Morning wiped out the stars & seagulls cried like bats”; who cannot empathise with someone who, in a boozy, down-beat moment sees the horizon peeling open with “phony billboards” featuring “faded cars, bad lawyers & disconnected numbers”?

I found a quieter poem, but no less effective, in “Viewing”. It’s the contemplation by a neighbour of a retired schoolteacher, husband and father of two, lying in a casket — “more wax / more chemicals than human meat” — alongside photographs of him attending communion, playing golf, the saxophone, tennis. Where, he wonders, is all that history now? They would meet occasionally taking out the trash:

in the starlight – diamond
crumbs on a backcloth — to stop
with a friendly word.
We weren’t especially close. 

It’s a fine poem, if a little incongruous in its sobriety in this thrilling, inventive and affecting collection presented with a sure touch and a refreshing vocabulary. The dominant tone here is one of nostalgia; a fond recollection of adolescent spirit, tempered by misdeeds and embarrassment, with questions about identity and belonging posed along the way. There is little anger or recrimination within these pages, although you feel that at times it might have been justified; instead, what comes across is a benign maturity, a sort of kindness. When poetry is so often dry, or heavy-going or, worst of all, cloyingly self-indulgent, these verses are nothing less than a surprise. Like finding buddleia breaking through the sidewalk.

One Illuminated Letter of Being by Donald Platt

I knew of a woman who, in the course of a terminal illness, and without giving much thought to the matter, expressed a liking for sweet peas. Before long, every table, every shelf and windowsill, was filled with the scent and colour of this most youthful, this most joyful of flowers until she could bear to look at them no longer. Such are the pitfalls in the prelude to loss.

This rather sad memory resurfaced after reading the collection of thirty-two poems in which Donald Platt lets us in on the uniquely personal, but ultimately universal trials of his mother’s illness, her death, and his subsequent mourning. Unflinching, but tenderly descriptive, they take us through the quiet courage, the moments of weakness, the little acts of unselfishness inherent in such an experience, in a gentle, but compelling series of unrhymed tercets. Along the way, autobiographical detail lends colour and perspective to a slowly developing picture of Platt and his family’s relationship with Martha, an artist and lover of classical music, who died in 2014 in her nineties. We meet, among others, Dana, his “million-piece jigsaw” wife with her own experience of recent  bereavement; his brother with Down syndrome whom his mother had not wanted to see in case her “skull-like head and jack-o’-lantern face…” might terrify him; and his two daughters making origami creatures — a peacock, frogs, ducks . . . for their grandmother sitting immobile in her yellow armchair. 

In the opening poem the author is looking at an old black-and-white photograph of himself at four years of age, lying in a bed alongside his baby brother. Their mother is smiling as she looks down on them both. Her eyelashes are long, he notes, and “her hair’s cut short. She’s dead.”  It’s a stark and arresting beginning to a tale which combines pathos, perception and occasionally humour, as when Platt finds himself in the meditation room at Albany airport after visiting his mother at the hospice earlier. He recalls her saying “I’m so ready to die” and prays that she will no longer have to endure her ninety-six-year-old body wrecked by sickness and pain. He remembers too the shared laughter at that colloquial “so” she had learned from watching TV. There’s something rather beautiful in that little exchange.

There’s a mingling of the factual and the lyrical, the day-to-day and the emotional that gives this collection such honesty; gives it integrity. I liked Martha’s attention to detail in planning her own funeral in “Fantaisie” (“. . . Bill Eakins to preach” — “give $100 to organist”); and in “Watercolor with Trees in Fog” the author remembers watching his mother paint: adding one last touch, a scrap of yellow, before appending the picture with a price tag of $65.00. He concludes, rather touchingly, that he will never be able to repay her. “Cloud Hands” is set in a hospice with various wards or units given Evelyn Waugh-esque names such as Harmony Lane and Hummingbird Hill. The place is described in detail, even down to its odours of urine, disinfectant and meatloaf. In Whispering Pines, his mother tells him it was good of him to come, and in a heart-breaking scene familiar to many, “the tears well up and burn my eyes so that I can no longer see her.”

Early one morning he receives a call to say his mother has passed on. Lung cancer, it says on the death certificate, and coronary artery disease. He had been with her only two hours earlier. Her ashes are buried — “a birthday present to the cold earth” — but she lives still: he talks to her; tells her what he has been doing. He sees and feels her presence everywhere. Sitting in a garden near Aubagne, east of Marseille, she is in “the silver green leaves of the twisted olive trees”; she is “the rooster that crows all night in expectation of the dawn” and “she’s the smell of thyme I crush between my fingers.”  There is a lovely moment when the author relates the story of how he came by the scar on his forehead. His mother had reminded him, one month before her death, how she had pushed him and a friend down the street on a sled, and they had crashed into a milk truck. And now the scar, the “signifier of my pain, of my mother’s self-blame” has become to him “love’s north star . . . still shining fifty-four light years away.” Such are the small compensations for the guilt and utter helplessness felt when witnessing the decline and passing of a loved one.

Plants, flowers, the natural world generally, feature a good deal in this fine narrative of love and loss: the “frail and foolish” crocuses that stand undismayed by desultory snow; the red-pink cloud of blossoms floating up from a crape myrtle; the lavender moth orchid he bought for his mother, and which he refers to as her “death orchid”. In “Wisteria” he’s planning to grow a variety called “Amethyst Falls”, building it a trellis anchored in concrete:

                                         and strung with horizontal
galvanized steel cable. I’ll train the wisteria’s wrought-iron vines
to climb and twine

through these staves, to become a sprawling G clef that will flower
into late spring’s
lavender notes, cross-pollinated by bees, its sound and scent carrying far

beyond our backyard.
On the harp strings of the trellis, it will blossom again and again into one
illuminated letter of being. 

It is a splendid poem, the last five words of which provide the title of this collection, describing practically but also quite beautifully the making of this living memorial to his dead mother. 

An old poet once told Platt that flowers were the only proper subject for poetry; it was an idea he dismissed out of hand at the time, but now he’s not so sure. His mother is dying when everything is coming into bloom, and there is a sadness, but also a sort of comforting inevitability in that fact; a parallel explored within these pages in an even, an almost subdued voice which, in its telling, is a quietly persuasive celebration of life.