Captive Voices, Eleanor Ross Taylor (poetry)

Last week the Poetry Foundation named Eleanor Ross Taylor winner of the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement for Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008. Ross Taylor's most recent collection has also been awarded the William Carlos Williams Book Award by the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.

One of the most distinguished voices in poetry, Ross Taylor is nonetheless lesser known compared to many of her contemporaries — who include Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, Richard Howard.

Little concerned with promotion, poetry readings or other requisites assumed by poets today, she has focused on the writing, and in it,she is guided by an inner compass. It is what I admire most about her work. But it is not an easy path, for the poet or those around her, as we learn from the slyly humorous "Always Reclusive," which begins:

"I'm constructing my own briarpatch. True,
I'm still bleeding from the first canes I dug in;
thorns fight off cultivation, cut both ways;
they like barbwiring things in ...

And concludes:

"The blackberry, permitted its own way,
is an unmanageable plant." Here's a
variety called "Taylor": "Season late,
bush vigorous, hardy... free from rust"
That's it. Don't let my briarpatch rust.

I love the hard, and hardy, 'b' sounds — briarpatch, bleeding, and the surprising 'barbwiring," — smacked up against the self-deprecating humor of the unmanageable, late-blooming Taylor.

The collection is rich with narratives, monologues, dialogues, voices heard and voices silenced. Ross Taylor works in words in much the way a visual artist builds a collage, bumping voices and images up against each other, not explaining, letting the shards and sharp edges reflect off each other, trusting her readers to — literally — read between the lines.

In "Long-Dreaded Event Takes Place," she writes:

it blurs
happening as on canvas
distanced...

glazed eyes catching
small smithereens:
the nurse's ring
bone pink smooth though modified
the brief convulsive reflex
and the driver's shoes well tied

everything establishes
my absence in this scene
later somewhere
I'll paint-in gaps, fill in
the larger picture,
withholdings spilled...

Of course, that will never happen. Written after her husband Peter Taylor's death, it perfectly captures the shell-shock of grief, and one might assume the poem is about that. But Ross Taylor does not fill in the gaps. She does not 'share.' She is a master at withholding. It is her power. It makes her poems difficult, but worth the struggle.

In presenting the Lilly Award, Christian Wiman announced that 10 of Ross Taylor's poems will be featured in the May issue of Poetry, giving her work wide readership. It is worth seeking out.

Light, Moving, Carolyn Miller (poetry)

Some books leap off the bookshelf, insisting that they be read. Carolyn Miller's Light, Moving was just such a book for me. From its title to its cover art — also by the poet — to its epigraph from Issa's The Spring of My Life, it spoke to me.

When I fanned through its pages, the 35-line invocation "Considering Flynn" first caught my eye. As a lover of all felines, I was entranced. It begins:

For he is the color of a fog bank over the ocean in late afternoon.
For his eyes are lined with charcoal gray like Cleopatra's...

before revealing — and reveling in — his true gifts:

For he sometimes gulps happiness when I hold him.
For his cry is small, and he purls, which is meowing with the mouth closed.
For his ancestor Jeoffrey was beloved by a poet who went mad. ...
For he is filled with Buddha nature.
For he does both the Up- and Downward-Facing Dog and, of course, the Cat.
For he attends to all his needs.
For he purrs.

This is my kind of poet.

Of course the collection, as the title suggests, is about far more. In its four sections — The Slanted Streets, The Memory of Light, In The Garden, and The World As It Is — the poet brings close attention both to the seen and the unseen.

"In Summer," after describing morning light "in a city where trees keep their leaves," the poet leaps — and we follow — to:

...suddenly the growing crowd
of my dead were close at hand.

I write their birthdays on my calendar each year
so I can keep them still
part of this flux, this wide sea, this spill
of light, this whir of wings sounding in my ear.

The collection is shot through with light, changing and moving but always attending to life. Miller gives the concluding poem a title from a line by Rumi, and by the time we read its opening lines, they have an earned resonance.

In "How Long Should You Look at the Earth's Face?" she exhorts:

Until you have memorized it, feature for feature, so
you can remember it, like your mother's voice
in the room of your skull, speaking to you for the last time
over the phone, saying "Are you happy?" Until
you are dumb with astonishment at having been given
so much...

Light, Moving is a beautiful publication by Sixteen Rivers Press, a nonprofit poetry collective in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Peeling an Orange, Peggy Heinrich (poetry/haiku)

December sunset
putting aside her journal
to peel an orange

This title haiku is representative of much the work found throughout Peggy Heinrich's collection: a vivid image expressed simply, some personal reflection, a small moment that gathers significance the longer one sits with it.

Organized seasonally with black and white photographs by John Bolivar marking the passage of time, it gives us a year in haiku. And like most years, it is not without its challenges.

sleepless at night...
some of the sheep
won't jump the fence

Dead-of-night anxieties are captured vividly in the recalcitrant sheep; this glancing suggestion of something greater below the surface typifies what makes this and other Heinrich haiku so effective.

For example, look at how green conveys multiple meanings in this haiku:

in the hammock
forgetting he-said-she-said
so many shades of green

The pettiness of fingerpointing fades in the face of so much new life; at the same time, "shades of green" also suggest shadows and envy.

Published in 2009 by The MET Press, Peeling an Orange is the work of a very gifted poet.

These are not poems that trumpet their brilliance. They are small jewels that reflect moments in time with seeming effortlessness and quiet grace. This is a collection that rewards re-reading.