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This National Poetry Month, Spend Time With These 3 Rich Reads
National Poetry Month, observed every April since 1996reflects the works of the poets themselves.
Poets lean close to the earth and its inhabitants, noticing the wounds and homemade medicines, the beautiful feelings and tragic history that permeate our lives. These elements exist perpetually, but the poems call them to a greater clearing.
Likewise, poetry is always there for us, among the omnipresent glories of being alive. But the April celebration calls us to special and more sacred attention. Here are brief overviews of three poetry titles from 2024 that deserve to be noticed with such respect and pleasure.
Sarah Ghazal Ali, “Theophanies”
Sarah Ghazal Ali's debut represents an early accomplishment. From surface to substance, the poems within resemble one of the great book covers of recent memory: wild, ecstatic, almost miraculous.
And if poems are like prayers and vice versa, Ali makes this connection on the first page, writing The places where I prayed, the elevators, Victoria's Secret/the fitting room, the muddy meadow after the rain will bear witness for or against me, / spreading throughout my Book of Acts / in ink of blood or honeyed milk.
In the most intimate layer, the most secret place, Ali's deliciously hot beginnings fill his own name surrounding him. Ghazal, an ancient Arabic poetic form. These pages paint the portrait of an artist for whom poetry is the center, the reason for living.
Throughout, Ali interweaves references to biblical and Quranic texts with her experience of womanhood, revealing their conversation in verse, showing how the sacred inhabits bodies and bodies add their own question marks, exclamation marks and ellipses to the holy scriptures.
Ali writes parables and vivid observations (A pair of apples blistering in the sun / my eyes have been so saturated); details the creative process of her god, shaping the people she loves in and outside of language; reflects on what it means to be a woman within a faith, within a world, always expressing her expectations of women.
I submitted once, faithfully, and it took years before I swelled with shame, she writes in Magdalene, before considering the common roots of terms like submission and Islam.
Ali writes his own body in parallel with the biblical stories (Self-Portrait as Epiphany features prominently among the many highlights here) and crafts a series of personal proverbs (In good cities, good houses mourn what dies / outside by closing windows, she writes in Roadkill Elegy).
And theologians of all faiths should teach Ali the descriptions of the angel Gabriel (O genderless and sexual / less messenger / O jagged nail / fat on His finger) and of faith itself (Ever heavy and whole / with or without me) and not as the sum of these concepts, but some of their many moving parts.
Conviction pushes the poet to create, sometimes to counter the work of his gods, sometimes as a collaborator and sometimes in a blurred space between the two (Like God, I will create in my image, Ali writes in a poem). Whatever Ali is crafting, from the inside out, these poems represent an indivisible art of faith and looping all around.
Carolyn Hembree, “For Today”
Artists from all disciplines offer distinct readings of what the dash means, the chiseled line between the years of birth and death on the tombstones under which we end up sleeping. In her latest collection, New Orleans-based poet Carolyn Hembree doesn't so much define the grand, unspeakable middle of our life cycles as she describes them: in weather, as an atmosphere that shapes and reveals our desires, our bonds, our quiet destinies. .
In the opener “A Few Measures,” Hembree reveals how the birth and death of other beloveds cannot help but define her worldly feeling: “What is taken, / what is taken in my milk (she fast), but a funeral song / she heard through coral walls. At your midday funeral, / my pregnant shadow gathered beneath me. Amen“.
Life goes on as it must, unfolding in the music of Captain Beefheart and Violent Femmes, the language of 'Rilke, / gospels, lines, a poem about guns composed decades / before so as not to worry suicide now gone / or gone”.
Hembree moves, grieving and preparing to be, through wet particles of her speaking child, past a “muddy, crashing river,” between “passing symptoms and elevators.” Clouds “about to rain” and mild mornings move him, as do his domestic and wild neighbors.
Hurricanes and other scourges strike, with their train of boil-water orders and makeshift home schools. The frogs buzz “crescendo and decrescendo,” and the fig trees simply “exist.” The dash stretches again. The nearness of sorrow remains as the poet moves through the world “like moss,” always seeking moisture and observing the curvature of our bodies.
“A friend told me that crying too long is selfish and distorts the mourner like rainy seasons distort old wood/Maybe I want to be distorted,” Hembree writes at one point.
The dash responds to the date to its right, but that's not all the dash or the poet does. Hembree lets humidity soak her skin and plugs leaks on a property; celebrates all that remains by drawing shapes around memories; meanders, flows to and from sources and writes at a steady pace.
These contradictions, beautiful and strange, make up momentum as much as anything else; Hembree knows this very well. “For Today” is a series of quiet moments that readers will yearn to absorb alongside the poet.
Michael Ondaatje, “A Year of Last Things”
Former Unbound Book Festival keynote speaker Michael Ondaatje returns once again to his first love, poetry. Although a companion across the decades, the form is less attached to its name and reputation than renowned novels such as “The English Patient.”
A reflective style and masterful touches define these poems as Ondaatje writes about the memories of 3 a.m., the “strange waking thought” of 7 a.m., the burden that slips and lightens from all its years, and the quietly lingering presence of what was and could have been. .
Ondaatje is self-referential, never self-indulgent, in his honorific treatment of the words themselves. He opens the poem “Lock” and collects it with this all-time verse:
Read the lines he likes / he slips them into a pocket, / wish to die with his clothes on / full of verses without tears / and phone numbers / of his children in distant cities
In “Definition,” he studies “the thirteen hundred plotless pages of a Sanskrit dictionary / with its verbs for holy obsessions.” In just four lines, he conjures up a writer's entire world in “The Cabbagetown Pet Clinic,” describing the creative work undertaken in a veterinary office, hovering among “the howls, the heavy breathing, the sighs/of this world far away and not translated.”
And “A Night Radio Station in Koprivshtitsa” delivers lyrical descriptions worthy of Ondaatje's canonical novels, writing “a museum of the night”, creating time under a “medieval firmament of bruised clouds, thunder and old chaos.
“A Year of Last Things” is technically brilliant and endlessly moving, a paean to the language Ondaatje loves, neither side of that equation ever losing out to the other.
Aarik Danielsen is the Tribune's features and culture editor. Contact him at [email protected] or by calling 573-815-1731.He is on Twitter/X @aarikdanielsen.
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