Monthly Archives: September 2023

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Lilacs Still Bloom in Ashburnham, by Fred Gerhard

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A new chapbook from my friend Fred Gerhard is subtitled Songs of Spring. Like that season, the poems in this tiny book carry sweetness and renewal.

Some of the poems are about everyday happenings, like children gathering dandelions, infused with a whisper of philosophy. Others are tributes to poets, their ideas and voices carried forward into today.

In some poems, striking imagery or unusual word choice captures the reader’s attention. Here’s the first stanza of “Moss.”

I once loved a woman who loved moss, knew moss,
and why the softest moss lay between the
rain-worn stones of indecipherable lives—

The natural world fuels these poems with its grandeur and generosity, its small gifts and minor delights. The beneficent effect of paying attention to the world around us provides a melody for the collection, as in the title poem where the narrator says: “I blossom / breaking my green walls.”

At a time when every bit of news arouses a mix of fury, despair and determination, these poems are a salve to the spirit.

What books or poems do you turn to when you despair at the state of the world?

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Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

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What a gem of a book! This short novel at first seems, as the title indicates, quiet and unassuming. Set in an Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlow who has earned a modest but sufficient position in life. As a purveyor of wood and coal, he refers to himself as “a man of doorways.” True, he is often knocking on doors to deliver loads coal or wood, but the description carries more meanings, both literal and metaphorical.

His background is unusual: an only child of a servant woman whose employer did not dismiss her when the pregnancy became obvious. Instead she kept his mother on and welcomed the child as well. Thus he grew up, while not exactly a member of the family, at least surrounded and supported with love and care from his mother, her employer, and Ned who worked there as well.

Set apart from the town is an orphanage and laundry run by the Magdalen order of nuns. I’ve read a good bit about the Magdalen laundries, so was not surprised by the conditions Bill gradually begins to discover. Yet Keegan presents them so quietly, so carefully through his personality, that they shocked me anyway.

There are many things in today’s world—and in the past as well—that make me despair of humanity. This book reminds me that there is goodness in this world if I am open to seeing it, and that it doesn’t have to be big thing like leading your nation’s resistance against an invading tyrant. It can be a small thing and still break your heart and mend it to be even stronger.

This is the novel I’m recommending to everyone this year. What novel are you recommending to people?

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The Fell, by Sarah Moss

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In the COVID lockdown. I was one of the lucky ones: healthy, able to work at home, and enough of an introvert to relish the time alone. Not everyone was so lucky, as I was well aware. Every say I saw and thought about the mail carriers, trash collectors, and delivery personnel on our otherwise empty street.

When I finally began to venture out to the grocery store, I wore a mask to protect the cashiers and other employees. I felt sad and angry that so many people—including my own sons and daughter-in-law—had no choice but to put their lives and those of their families on the line.

Now, a few years later, I barely remember those times, so I was eager to pick up this brief novel by Sarah Moss, whose Ghost Wall I had previously enjoyed.

Set in a village in the Peak district of England during the early lockdown, the story moves between four characters. Fittingly, the four almost never interact with each other, so we meet each one alone and plunge deeply into their psyche, creating a surprisingly gripping psychological novel.

Kate is a progressive single mother who has been exposed to COVID, so must self-isolate for two weeks, along with her teenaged son Matt. Since cafe where she works is shut down, they are struggling financially, but worse for her is the confinement to the house and yard. Matt is happy to blow off his online lessons and spend his days immersed in video games and helping his mom around the house, but she is not. Devoted to the outdoors, she is used to rambling the fells every day and feels suffocated and nearly out of her mind.

One day, near dusk, she grabs her backpack—always filled with the essentials dedicated hikers know to carry—and sets out for a brief walk on the nearby fell, reasoning to herself that she will almost certainly be the only out there, so she won’t endanger anyone.

When she doesn’t return, Matt is frantic but doesn’t want to get her in trouble by reporting her missing. Their next-door neighbor Alice, retired and with health problems, sees Kate go, but for the same reason doesn’t report her. Still, when Kate doesn’t return Alice worries about Matt, and eventually calls and persuades him to report his mother as missing.

The Mountain Rescue Team is summoned, including Rob, a divorced father whose teenaged daughter is furious about his departure on this rare night together. He is our fourth person, weighing his responsibility to his daughter against the missing woman’s safety, his commitment to the team, and his own desire to be out on the fell.

This is the thread through the four people’s stories: how do we balance our wants and needs with our responsibilities to others, not just family, but the person next door, the cashier at the village shop, the team that has to come out on a cold night to scour the fell?

Alice mourns for Matt, left alone through the long night, as the team searches for his mother, but is unsure about going to be with him, given her health problems and his exposure to the virus. Matt is unsure how to interact with the rescuers. And they, if they are lucky enough to find Kate, will have to touch this person who may have COVID and then go home to their families. Kate must wrestle with her own guilt and possible mortality.

Having hiked those fells myself just a few months ago, I was especially invested in this story. I saw how easily things could go wrong, even for the most experienced hiker. I met people on the trail who set off this way and that, determined to explore remote paths, and a woman who swam alone every day all the way around a large, usually deserted, mountain tarn. I knew about the Mountain Rescue Team—bless them!—and was doubly diligent about being careful on the slippery stones on the steep fells. I did not want to be carried out with a broken ankle!

Moss set herself a challenge with this book. A story about isolation and boredom could fall apart so easily, especially one with almost no scenes showing characters interacting. However, she succeeds brilliantly, with suspense building throughout the brief time frame of the story, abetted by the ticking clock of injury and exposure.

The characters come alive, convincingly portrayed in their intensely personal sections. Each of them will haunt me for some time. And each is wrestling with an issue that all of us—COVID or no COVID—are navigating every day: how to balance individual freedom with collective responsibility.

Have you read a novel that illuminates our particular moment in time?

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Swarm, by Jorie Graham

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When I enter the world of a poem or story, I expect to be entering the author’s mind through the world they have created. Nowhere is this feeling stronger than in reading Graham’s poetry.

I know that each poem is carefully crafted, yet I feel a rare immediacy. I am in the presence of a mind in conversation with itself, breathlessly carried from one thought to another, whether the flow is tumultuous or a slow stream or even stuttering drops, a trickle that comes and goes.

This collection, more than the others I’ve read or tried to read, is something to absorb all at once, a perhaps-coherent whole. Yet for all the time I have sat with it, I cannot give you a thumbnail description.

It describes not so much an epiphany—Graham has long stood out against poems that offer such a moment, such a resolution—as a grappling with a moment of profound change. In some poems she takes on a persona such as Agamemnon, Calypso, Eurydice; others read like journal entries, while still others are prayers or explorations of what it means to live a life or to lose it.

Graham’s poems can be difficult to read. A Modernist, she treats narrative and even language itself as suspect, constantly doubling back on herself, doubting herself, exposing herself. Crusty critic William Logan says, “Graham makes you wish stream of consciousness had never been invented.” Yet even he praises her “sprezzatura.”

It is her daring that thrills me, her going all out even if it means discarding forms and traditions and the poetic line itself.

I also appreciate how she attaches value to the moments of our lives, how she finds joy in small things. The poem “2/18/97” begins:

Of my life which I am supposed to give back.
Afterwards.
Having taken part in it.

She goes on to name some of the things to give back.

. . .the gentle lawns of this earth.
A sudden rain sweeping the petals along.
And pebbles the rain won’t move.
And these bodies . . .

The poem is more than these moments. It is an argument with the “soil that brightens and darkens,” that demands we live and later that we die. It is a holding close of our treasures even as they slip away:

children playing music on their knuckles,
feet skipping, dirt tossed round and then resettling on
                        their prints
where dance steps are
for just a moment longer
        visible—

It is a vision of a god, a breath, a giving up, and that which will not be given up.

Yes, her poems can be difficult to read. But if you sit with them for a while, you may find the words—mistrusted as they are—opening. You may find new ways of being in the world.

Have you been reading any poetry lately? Share in the comments.