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Two poets who between them span the planet and never fail
to interest: Lorna Goodison and Maxine Kumin are both highly experienced and
successful poets. So, are these two new books up to the mark? Let's see.
Goldengrove begins with a clutch of new poems, before representing her
previous collections with well-chosen highlights. The opening poem sets the
tone immediately. Its fifteen lines take on the appearance and feeling of a
sonnet, without the sense of artifice which can be a danger of this form. It
has something of the quality of Larkin's 'Days' while remaining positive and
somehow feminine:
On love lane,
the chemist and dispenser
changes each
day into a fresh clean gown
('Balm')
Only what is being dispensed here is love potions. The poem is exquisitely
sensuous, using words like 'unguent' and 'aromatic atoms'. Goodison makes
magic with words and one falls under her spell with delight. Next follows a sequence based on a
powerful and charming character, Cassamere, drawn from 'a narrative by W. H.
Hinson. The persona in the sequence is his apprentice, which is a perfect
choice for an observer. The sequence reads like a verse novel, as we are
shown the biography of the character in the most delightful way, using
wonderfully precise words, which charm every bit as much as the character
himself:
He rewired
black holes that shone forth like in the ages
when they
were fully occupied by our sky guardians
who had
looked down and seen those wicked ships
and descended
to crouch with us on our rough passage.
('Fireworks')
Goodison here smoothly moves from the topic of the poem, which contains other
wonderful things, like a reference to Blake ('the stars threw/ down their
spears from the Heavens over Blue Mountains') to the collective memories of
slavery, in one masterful movement setting up resonances which move us all
the more profoundly by being understated, without a trace of special pleading
or sentimentality. She creates or recalls people who move us by their dignity
and love, such as, in 'Rock of Ages', the woman who plays the organ in
church:
Come Sunday,
she sits straight-backed
adjusts her
gold-framed spectacles,
sight reads
and plays the pipe organ
for common
prayers who whisper behind her back,
but never to
her face set like flint.
The stanza break here is beautifully used to create a sense of shock. We are
drawn into the poem, as we want to hear what they could possibly have to say
against this brave and upright woman; the story we hear is about her
faithless husband, yet it marks her with shame. By the end of the poem, she
has become Christ-like, suffering for his sins. Yes, the new poems do measure
up, and they fill the reader with a hunger for more Lorna Goodison, and so,
on to the rest of the book, where there are no disappointments but plenty of
golden moments. People still figure highly, and there are poems about music
(as well as references to music embedded in many of the poems), travel, art,
history and philosophy. I will be reading this book for a long time and
suggest you should too. It's the perfect introduction to this important and
deeply compassionate poet.
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Jack is Kumin's
fifteenth collection, and is rather a lovely thing, printed on thick cream
paper, with a stunning painting by Wolf Kahn on the cover. These poems are
more loosely strung than Goodison's; they have that relaxed conversational
style so characteristic of contemporary American poetry. Kumin often chooses
not to punctuate, just using line breaks to structure the work, and she is
also fond of lists:
Fox on
his back in a hole
snake
eyes in the walls asleep
grubs
shellacked in their coils
sap
locked tight to the pith
roots
sucking a hollow tooth
a
brown and pregnant bear
leaf-wrapped like an old cigar...
This is the central stanza in 'Fox on his Back', a lovely poem in homage to
Theodore Roethke, based on the idea that the winter is to remember love. She
also loves fables and fairy stories. 'Widow and Dog' tells a story about how
a widow welcomes animals into her life and begins writing poetry, to console
herself. The language in it is beautifully kinaesthetic and onomatopoeic:
Autumn
fell on them in a joyous rush. The first
needles
of hard frost, the newly sharp wind, the final
sweep
and swirl of leaves, a swash of all day rain
It can also be seen that Kumin is a splendid nature poet, as well she might
be, living in New Hampshire which Frost was so delightfully inspired by in
his turn. In fact, the similarity with Frost can be striking in several
places.
Another poem I enjoyed, and I am often too lazy to read long poems, but this
one draws you in so completely it didn't feel like a long poem, is 'The
Brothers'. It uses the story of Chang and Eng, the famous conjoined twins, as
a fable about sibling animosity, interweaving the two stories, the twins and
the persona's brothers skilfully, sustains it using a simple three lines per
stanza form, until a bleak ending is reached:
Their
widows are condemned to dine
on
plattersful of hate to the end.
This ending is immediately super-ceded by a happy one, in which 'the brothers
die like Chang and Eng/minutes apart', which reconciles the two broken
branches of the family. It's an excellent narrative poem which really
provokes thought. There's a memorable and touching poem about a phone call
with her dead father, to which I keep returning. It is totally unsentimental,
even funny, yet it ultimately moves one completely. They almost start to
argue, just as fathers and daughters do, and he gets on to his hobby horse
about not buying land on a hill. It's just so honest and perfectly evokes the
relationship.
The title poem is another poem of loss; this time for 'a big-nosed roan
gelding' she 'let go' to a friend who 'sold him down the river'. This
reference to the slave trade works well here because the sense of betrayal is
so strong, and is also implies the horse was sold to cruel new owners who
worked him to death. The poem is an elegy for him in which she consoles
herself by wondering if he remembered his last winter with her, even when he
was 'alone' in a 'rough stall'. The book ends with a beautiful love poem,
which simply considers the small everyday survivals the very essence of love:
If these are
Virginia and Leonard, are they not
also you and
me taking up the coffee
grinder or
scraping bits of omlet free
for the
waiting dogs who salivate and sit?
Never
to say what one feels. And yet
this is a
love poem. Can you taste it?
Kumin's collection is full of such delights, as is Goodison's. So, yes, these
two books preserve the poets' reputations and add to them. Two very different
poets in terms of techniques and voice, but both compassionate and full of
love, character and sense of history. Both collections celebrate the
resilience of humankind and the endurance of love.
© Angela Topping
2006
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