Reading Women in 2010

Captive Voices, Eleanor Ross Taylor (poetry)

2010-04-21T15:41:00.001-07:00

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)

2010-04-17T09:04:00.001-07:00

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)

2010-04-09T16:47:00.000-07:00

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.

Naming Nature, Carol Kaesuk Yoon (nonfiction)

2010-03-20T15:55:00.001-07:00

Whether you are a scientist or a reader of science or just someone who cares deeply about the world, you will find much to like in Carol Kaesuk Yoon's book, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science.

I first discovered Yoon's writing when I read her essay about the movie Avatar in The New York Times. A science writer with a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology, she has been writing articles for NYT for years, but it was the blockbuster movie that first brought her writing to my attention. I immediately responded to her "potent joy" in the wonders of the natural world. That and her very engaging way with words.

In that essay, she mentioned she had just completed a book, Naming Nature. I sought it out, and I was not disappointed. Naming Nature journeys through the history of the science of taxonomy, scrutinizing our desire to make sense of the natural world, and argues that it is driven by the human "umwelt" (pronounced, as Yoon helpfully notes, OOM-velt). Our umwelt consists of what we perceive in the world, so it will vary from place to place. Someone who lives in the desert will have a very different umwelt from someone who lives in the mountains.

There is nothing dry about taxonomy the way Yoon tells it. Here's how she describes the cassowary, a creature that has given taxonomists and various peoples fits over the years — is it a bird or not?

Sometimes reaching six and a half feet tall, the cassowary is a claw-your-eyes-out-if-cornered bipedal bird, with a black mop of a body, a tiny head that can be shockingly bright blue, and hefty, clomping legs and feet. Think bloated, sinister-looking Big Bird with attitude...

After tracing the evolution of traditional taxonomy, its battles to define and order nature that is no longer local but global, its rise and inevitable fall when pitted against mathematical proofs and scientific observations at the level of microorganisms, Yoon concludes with a direct appeal to the non-scientists among us. She makes the case that — while there is value in science discovering what cannot be perceived with human eyes — we should not be so quick to give up our connection to the natural world:

The living world is dying, but it's not too late...Think back to a time in your life before you knew what science was, before you could tell a Coke from a Pepsi..when every beacon on your umwelt shone bright and clear and welcome. Then find an organism—any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle, exotic, mundane...and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. Feel your umwelt rev up...Then find a name for it. Take your pick... This changes everything, yourself included... once you have a name ... you begin to see the shape, the natural order of living things. You will begin to notice life where it is, all around you. It's not too late.

This is a praise song for the living world.

I am not alone in my enthusiasm for Naming Nature. It was named a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, one of the Best Books of 2009 by New Scientist, one of the Best Sci-Tech Books of 2009 by Library Journal.

This is the best kind of science writing: I learned a great deal, and I loved every minute.

The Stream Singing Your Name, Jean LeBlanc (poetry/tanka and sijo)

2010-03-14T12:41:00.000-07:00

Every once in awhile, I come across a book I do not want to end, that engages on many levels and invites me to re-read, to linger a bit longer. Jean LeBlanc's The Stream Singing Your Name is just such a book.

I was unfamiliar with LeBlanc's work before discovering it at the Modern English Tanka Press, but I was intrigued when I realized it contained both tanka and sijo. Sijo — pronounced shee-jo — is a classical Korean form consisting of three lines, traditionally 14-15 syllables each. LeBlanc intermingles the two forms, sometimes alternating, sometimes offering a sequence of sijo or a series of tanka, and creates a tapestry that brings out the best in each.

I find myself returning especially to her sijo. With its languid long lines, they are a beautiful foil to the emotional immediacy of the shorter-lined tanka. I have so many favorites in this collection. But on this day, I was struck by this lyrical and life-affirming sijo:

When I die, do what you have to do to make me, not of this earth,
but of these rocks, this limestone ridge. I want to feed the lichens,
anchor ferns firmly in these clefts, become my mineral self.

Whether she is writing about her students who don't distinguish between funereal and funeral, the dandelions she gives free rein every spring, her father's shoulders made strong from chopping wood or her garden in October with its

redbud leaves
and other crinkled hearts
beneath my feet

Jean LeBlanc reveals a deep regard for the world. Throughout the collection, the flow seems effortless, taking the reader from one to the next, until you arrive at the stream of the title in the final double sijo, and:

You wonder if you could just stand here, forever,
the stream singing your name around you.

The Unworn Necklace, Roberta Beary (poetry/haiku)

2010-03-12T19:52:00.001-08:00

hating him
between bites
of unripe plums

Roberta Beary's haiku often give the reader a sensory double-shot. When I read the above haiku, for example, I feel the hardness of the immature heart-shaped fruit even as my mouth puckers with the bitterness of plum and love gone sour.

For five years in the 90s, Beary lived in Tokyo, where she began her study of haiku. It was time well-spent. Although The Unworn Necklace is her first collection, many of the haiku within are award-winners.

As one whose cats heighten my own awareness of the natural world, I immediately identified with this, which won Honorable Mention in the National League of American Pen Women's International Haiku Contest 1997:

not hearing it
till the cat stirs
birdsong

And I was struck by the emotional subtlety and suggestion of something greater than we can know in this haiku, which was awarded Grand Prize in the Kusamakura International Haiku Competition in 2006:

thunder
the roses shift
into shadow

And this:

funeral home
here too
she straightens his tie

That bittersweet acknowledgement is what I respond to in so many of Beary's haiku. This is haiku that echoes in the mind and heart long after the book has been put away.

Bringing Yoga to Life, Donna Farhi (nonfiction)

2010-03-05T15:26:00.000-08:00

I am one of those people who likes the idea of yoga but rarely manages more than a session every blue moon. But the blurb on the back of Donna Farhi's Bringing Yoga to Life promised "a practical discipline for everyday living...encouraging and straightforward." And much to my amazement, it has motivated me to spend a few minutes each day on the mat.

What is different about Farhi's approach? It sounds odd, but I responded to her voice — not in some woo-hoo way, but to its clarity and frankness.

Early in the first section, "Coming Home," she writes:

… we may notice that we consistently allow the urgent to override the important... that we have a deeply ingrained habit of giving the most time, energy, and commitment to things that ultimately are not very important...

And with that she had me. Allowing the urgent to override the important is what I do best.

In the book’s third section, “Roadblocks and Distractions,” she takes on sloth, strong emotions, blind spots, assumptions, and self-worth, and makes it clear that yoga practice will reveal much more than your ability to hold a pose. If she had not already acquired credibility in the earlier chapters — through her empathy for the difficulty of practice and her honesty in exposing fallacy in shortcuts — she would have with this:

I am always a bit suspicious of people who walk around spouting angelic proclamations about how wonderful and beautiful and full of light everything is... I'm not talking about the wonderful silence that one feels around a Tibetan monk, who really is that silence. I'm talking about a flamboyant, in-your-face, exhibitionist goodness that should have warning labels on it.

And at the close of the book:

All Yoga practices lead to seeing things as they are... Instead of running away, we can sit still, breathe, and watch.

Nothing easy about it. But Farhi inspired me to begin.

The Human Line, Ellen Bass (poetry)

2010-02-27T06:16:00.000-08:00

A flyer announcing the 28th annual reading In Celebration of the Muse in Santa Cruz, CA, prompted me to read Ellen Bass' latest poetry collection. One of 20 women writers featured at the Muse reading this year, Bass will be joined by some of Santa Cruz’ finest, including Angie Boissevain, Joan Zimmerman, Lisa Allen Ortiz, and Julia Alter-Canvin, among others. It promises to be a great evening celebrating great writing.

As Bass’ title suggests, the poems in this collection revolve around human concerns: the birth of a child, the death of a parent, relief over the homecoming of a lost dog, compassion for a woman who has run over the poet's cat, dancing with her love to Louis Jordan. Running through these poems is a deep awareness — and celebration — of the ordinary joys and suffering that make life so extraordinary.

A personal favorite is "Asking Directions in Paris," which captures perfectly the experience of trying — and mostly failing — to communicate in another's language.

Ou est le boulevard Saint Michel?
You pronounce the question carefully...
you feel a flicker of accomplishment.

But the triumph is short-lived when the helpful native speaker does not provide a textbook answer, instead replying with:

...something wholly unintelligible,
some version of: On the corner,
he is a shop of jewels in a fountain
when the hotel arrives on short feet.

I laughed out loud at this. Bass nailed the way language is acquired (or not) in a jumble of words heard and misheard. And then she turned it, from being a simple observation of personal failing, to something far bigger:

you think this must be how it is
with destiny: God explaining
and explaining what you must do,
and all you can make out is a few
unconnected phrases, a word or two, a wave
in what you pray is the right direction.

This is Bass' gift: at their best, her poems invite us in through the door of specific experience, and then show us how — as she writes in the title poem — we are all lashed to the human line.

Voices, Lucille Clifton (poetry)

2010-02-25T19:12:00.000-08:00

I first discovered Clifton’s poetry more than 20 years ago and treasured her work, reading every collection. But I had overlooked her two most recent books. After her death earlier this month, I decided to correct that.

Voices is Clifton’s final book. Throughout her life, she often gave voice to those who could not speak. Here, she continues to do so, albeit offering up some surprising choices. I don't recall her writing animal monologues before this. I was intrigued to read the prayers of dog, horse and raccoon, and I thought she captured perfectly the simmering anger voiced by Cream of Wheat of food product fame. Other voices include those of family and friends no longer living.

It is a gift, to throw their voices to us. The one that soared above the others and touched me most deeply, however, was Clifton’s own in the poem, "sorrows." In lines that recalled "the message from The Ones" in Mercy, she begins by comparing sorrows to angels:

who would believe them winged
who would believe they could be

beautiful . . .

Then she evokes an amazing image of them clicking/their bony fingers, before ending on a whisper:

. . . enough . . . not me again

but who can distinguish
one human voice

amid such choruses
of desire

It is an extraordinary poem that can be read in its entirety on the Poetry Foundation website.

Since Lucille Clifton’s death, much has been written about her. Elizabeth Alexander has a particularly touching tribute in the New Yorker.

If you have not read her work — or have not read it in awhile — I encourage you to do so. She will be missed, but her resilient and enduring voice can still be heard through her books, most of which are available through BOA Editors Ltd, her long-time publisher.

Mercy, Lucille Clifton (poetry)

2010-02-20T15:52:00.000-08:00

In the poem, "here rests," after returning to care for their dying father, Clifton's sister Josephine turns to her:

when you poem this
and you will...
remember the Book of Job.

And though there was a suggestion of humor in that sisterly aside, there is a Job-like quality, an anguish, throughout Mercy, Clifton's 12th collection of poetry.

Lucille Clifton died on Feb. 13, after many health challenges. Published half a dozen years ago, Mercy reflects some of her struggles and works to transcend them.

Early in the collection, a poem begins:

surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red

Then, of course, there is that inevitable "but." Anyone who has read Clifton's work knows that despite their accessibility and seeming simplicity of language, her poems are never that easy, as she acknowledges in this searing query at the end:

. . . why
is there under that poem always
an other poem?

In workshops, emerging poets are often warned against the use of certain words — words such as "soul" and "angel." Few poets have the voice, the moral authority, to pull them off. But Clifton did.

In the last long sequence titled "the message from The Ones (received in the late 70s)" she speaks of angels as a matter of fact, then provides this warning: They come disguised in the daily, and they:

will keep coming

unless you insist on wings

Clifton was an insightful and incisive poet, with many awards and honors to her credit. But I will most remember her for her generous spirit. I had the good fortune of spending time with her in the mid-90s when she did a number of readings in rural Minnesota, as part of a poetry residency. It was a bitterly cold winter, but everywhere she drew crowds — students, young families with small children, and writers of every stripe from the well-established to just-emerging. And she warmed us all with her poems and her presence.

Piece Work, Barbara Presnell (poetry)

2010-02-15T06:49:00.000-08:00

Early in Piece Work, "Charlie, First Shift Foreman" explains how he is following his father's lead — a farmer who always had "good hands" with his cows:

I do my daddy's work here in the plant,
for it's me makes sure this cloth
has a good hand...
Put that on your skin
every morning in a t-shirt and you'll know
why what I do means something in this world...

And in "Tanisha Talks About Knitting," she knows the risks of the deafening machines, but she is good at her job and proud:

I can't hardly leave this spot to pee —
thread or something might pop loose...

...Twelve machines is all anybody gets
no matter how good they is. I'm on ten.
...you got to get better and faster to earn
your machines...

And so Tanisha coaches Manuel, the immigrant worker with the baby daughter who has a hole in her heart. Then before anyone can believe it, the factory is closed, the work outsourced to Port Au Prince.

Reading these poems is like listening to my aunt or my grandmother tell me the way it was, giving me snippets of history. The 2007 winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize celebrates work from an insider’s view through the voices of the cutters, spinners, bar tackers, quality control and supers in a textile mill in the Carolinas.

I care what happens to Charlie and Tanisha and Manuel, to Velma in packaging and Charlene in quality control, to Carl the HR guy and Mr. S.B., the owner who knew all their names and their children's names. It's rare to read a book of poetry about work, but these are hard-earned experiences, and through Barbara Presnell, each voice rings clear and true.

Lip Prints, Alexis Rotella (poetry/tanka)

2010-02-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

In the shortest
and longest
month of the year,
the chocolate I crave
is the dark bitter kind.

There are few better ways to mark Valentine's Day than with bittersweet tanka such as this and others found in Lip Prints, which contains almost three decades of Alexis Rotella's five-line poems.

Rotella is a master of the short form, whether it is haiku, senryu, or tanka, and I have admired her writing since I first discovered it in The Haiku Anthology, edited by Cor Van Den Heuvel.

When reading a collection that represents a body of work, I like to put together the poet's lexicon, words that recur in various forms and that seem to carry a special charge for that writer.

Rotella's tanka are replete with stars — galaxies of stars, dandelion stars, frost stars; light — whether it is starlight, moonlight, or the light of fireflies; lace — lace curtains, Queen Anne's lace, ice blossoms and lace crystals; and the color white — white cat, chrysanthemums, gauze dress and Milky Way as well as the aforementioned dandelions, lace, frost and stars. It is a resonant lexicon, reflecting a broad imaginative and emotional range.

For example, this tanka moved me deeply:

Our white cat
gone seven years
and still
her light
in every room.

Just as Rotella describes a lover leaving a "trail of quick kisses," these tanka capture moments of experience and offer them as little gifts to the reader.

This is a collection I will return to and re-read. Unfortunately, tanka can be difficult to find in bookstores or online distributors. But the MET Press, the Modern English Tanka Press, is a great resource, offering Lip Prints as well as Rotella's surprising Elvis in Black Leather (gotta love those titles!) along with collections of many other tanka poets.

Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa, Karin Muller (nonfiction)

2010-02-08T05:19:00.000-08:00

Focus. Harmony. Wa. I wasn't even sure exactly what wa was, but I wanted some.

A decade of Judo practice, service in the Peace Corps, an engagement followed by disengagement, and a dream job as a filmmaker with National Geographic — none of this gave Karin Muller a ready answer to a birthday taunt from her brother: Still looking for the meaning of life?

Anyone who has fallen in love with the Japan of perfectly raked rock gardens and Zen-like equanimity will understand Muller's quest. But since almost everyone has written about it, I resisted reading yet another memoir. Until my Japanese tutor's husband, a man who has experienced his own share of 'lost in translation' moments, assured me it was worth it.

Japanland — despite its often hilarious moments — proved to be a painful read. Dissonant, focused on the wrong things, Muller’s search for harmony often revealed a shocking lack of awareness and consideration of others that was all too reflective of my own clumsy efforts over the years. But Muller gained entree into corners of contemporary and ancient Japan rarely experienced by non-Japanese (or for that matter, by many Japanese).

Over the course of a year, she learned firsthand about sword-making and sumo, the life of a 60-year-old geisha and Kobo Daishi's pilgrimage to 88 temples in search of enlightenment, just to name a few examples.

At the end of her journey she finds herself at a local Judo club with a handful of students half her age and a sensei many years her senior. There she is thrown. And thrown. And thrown again.

Japanland is about being thrown and getting up: a funny, painful, honest foray into what it is like to lose — and find — yourself in another culture.

Sleeping with Houdini, Nin Andrews (poetry)

2010-02-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

Who could resist a book titled, Sleeping with Houdini? Or an opening poem that introduces us to a girl who concludes: It is only by lying that she can stay alive. Or "Dear Confessional Poet," with its proclamation: I hate what you do. You and your entire school.

As might be expected, the magical Houdini appears and disappears throughout the collection, along with others whose escapes Andrews documents with a quirky mix of irreverence and longing. Many of the poems are magical in the way Grimm's fairy tales are – dark and provocative. But they can also be smartly funny. "Male Logic" – with its self-help tape, Reason Your Way to Bliss – is a laugh-out-loud riff on the failure to communicate.

Throughout, Nin Andrews shows herself to be a Houdini of the prose poem: masterful, confident, always pushing the limits of what this reader will entertain.

"Sleeping for Kafka" exemplifies this. After positing the idea that prayers can heal, it takes us on a magic carpet ride during which prayers can be purchased by calling an 800 number, Kafka's insomnia is slaked by his lover's sleep, angels traverse a ladder of Jacob's thoughts, and Nietzsche speculates on whether people really think. And then it concludes with this amazing assertion:

...Many people are dreamt and prayed. They are like seashells inhabited by hermit crabs.

Most of us have no clue whose dreams we are.

Sometimes dark, always daring, Andrews' collection of prose poems with its sudden turns and swerves, swivels and leaps, never fails to engage. The Monserrat Review listed Sleeping with Houdini among its Best Books of Poetry in 2007, and I understand why. This is a poet worth seeking out.

Morning Haiku, Sonia Sanchez (poetry/haiku)

2010-01-31T12:21:00.000-08:00

Sonia Sanchez is a prolific and award-winning poet, distinguished by the originality and range of her voice. But she is not a poet who comes to mind when I think of haiku.

And were they my own, I probably would not call the sequences in her recent collection haiku. These are human-centered fragments, in which kigo rarely appear. Few can stand outside the context of their sequences. Their power is in their layering.

They reminded me of a conversation I have had many times with my husband. Frustrated in my efforts to acquire rudimentary Japanese, I keep searching for the secret to fluency. His response, as a linguist and as someone who moves easily between languages: "At some point, you have to claim it and make it your own."

In her brief introduction, Sanchez writes of discovering haiku as a young woman and knowing immediately it offered something both ordinary and extraordinary, a connection to her true nature and to that which is greater than self, and she cites Patricia Donegan's Haiku Mind to elucidate. So, this is not a casual grabbing of a label. She has claimed this form and makes it her own. A few excerpts:

11.
to be born
to be raped
each journey a sudden wave
--from "sister haiku (for Pat)"

5.
("Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald")

Nose. mouth. eyes.
green. orange.
yellow voice spinning....
--from "6 haiku (for Beauford Delaney)"

10.
your hands
shimmering on the
legs of rain
--from "10 haiku (for Max Roach)"

This last sequence in honor of American jazz drummer Max Roach is stunning, especially in performance. You can hear Sanchez reading it at NPR in an April 2009 recording.

Morning Haiku is a praise song of a different sort. These are activist haiku, embracing humanity and celebrating connection to family, friends and those who came before us.

In Praise of Falling, Cheryl Dumesnil (poetry)

2010-01-30T19:55:00.000-08:00

Sneaker-clad clerks racing for the commuter train, a boy named Jackpot, Karen Carpenter and Led Zeppelin, a child's Mr. Potato Head with eyes where arms should be, a two-year old's prized word collection — Cheryl Dumesnil's poems flash with telling details. Winner of the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, her collection of narratives celebrates the risks we take in living.

For example, in "Bernal Heights" (featured on Verse Daily) we hear Jackpot's "song of luck."

In "A Soldier's Home, Hughes, Arkansas, 1970," Dumesnil writes about a photograph taken long ago:

...the solder's creased shoulders
wait to grow chevrons, inverted V's

flying upward, out of this place.

And the title poem can be read in its entirety on the author's website.

But it was the structure of the collection that intrigued me. She divides her poems into four sections, an organizing strategy that can make it seem predictable. But as the title states, this is a book about falling. And there is a suggestion of call and response; falls are always succeeded by getting back up. This is a praise song for resilience.

The Collaborative Habit, Twyla Tharp (nonfiction)

2010-01-24T15:05:00.000-08:00

Twyla Tharp opens The Collaborative Habit, her follow-up to the 2003 triumph, The Creative Habit, noting that as a choreographer she is also a "career collaborator," and the lessons she has learned apply to any discipline. And therein lies the problem. Unlike her earlier work with its myriad exercises that left me invigorated and inspired, The Collaborative Habit is about work, the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, day-in/day-out process of getting the job done. The creative process prompts us to take flight; collaborations require that our feet remain solidly on the ground.

But if the process is less magical, Tharp's insights are no less relevant. She understands that the best partnerships both challenge us and change us, and when successful, they produce something greater and different than either partner could have achieved independently.

I found especially interesting her point that the less well you know a partner, the more advance work you must do, including building in protection against failure. And yet despite her contractual escape clauses — specifying deadlines that must be met, milestones that must be marked — she has never walked away from a project. It is that work ethic I admired so much in The Creative Habit. Twyla Tharp believes in working to make it work.

And if new partnerships prompt a flurry of due diligence, collaborations with friends give her even greater pause. She understands the siren call of wanting to work with people you like, who share your values and your dreams. But she cautions against it, detailing the great risks working together brings and questioning how losing a friend could possibly be worth it.

If The Collaborative Habit does not have the juice of The Creative Habit, it is just as generous, offering a front row seat on all that Tharp has learned in four decades of practice.

Heavenly Maiden Tanka, Akiko Baba (poetry/tanka)

2010-01-17T08:56:00.000-08:00

older now
than my mother when she died
I put my hair up!
as if this morning I am leaving
alone for a strange country

haha no yowai
harukani koete
yuu kami ya
ryuuri ni mukau
asa no gotoki ka

Akiko Baba's work is simultaneously reflective and daring, personal and universal. This tanka is a good example: it is a coming of age poem, capturing that moment in a woman's life when she realizes she is in uncharted territory. She will have to find her own way.

For more than half a century, Akiko Baba wrote tanka, the traditional Japanese form comprised of 31 syllables divided into lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Baba's work is well-known and highly regarded in Japan, but little known in the U.S. Hatsue Kawamura and Jane Reichhold, her translators and fellow tanka poets, have done us a great service by sharing 100 of her poems selected from 16 collections. I was especially pleased that they included the original Japanese, both in Romaji (shown in this post) and the original Kanji/kana.

The Romaji allows non-Japanese readers to appreciate the lyricism of the originals, and through her imagery, Baba lets the natural world speak to human concerns. She sounds many themes in these tanka: loss, loneliness, fierce independence, understanding that the universe is much bigger than we know.

coming from afar
from another galaxy
some souls
are faintly white
dogwood flowers

ginkan no
kanata yori kishi
tamashii no
honokani shiroki
yamabooshi no hana

Emily Dickinson wrote that the test of a good poem is whether it takes the top of your head off. Baba's tanka can generate that kind of visceral response. This one takes my breath away.

like snow
like leaves of a tree
as light as
the click click of collecting
the bones of my mother

yuki no yooni
konoha no yooni
awakereba
sakuri sakuri to
haha wo sukueri

In Japan cremation is customary. But fire is not absolute, as Baba reminds us. She shows us ashes in the snow, the leaves, both images of regeneration. And with the click click sound of chopsticks, we understand it is for the survivors to retrieve what remains, to honor and remember. It is an extraordinary tanka.

To Hear the Rain, Peggy Lyles (poetry/haiku)

2010-01-16T00:38:00.000-08:00

for her mother
bluets
roots and all

This haiku – with its echoes of 'oo' in bluets and roots and suggestion of bluesy longing – is among my favorites from this collection of Peggy Lyles' haiku. Lyles has long been recognized for her prize-winning haiku and currently serves as one of four associate editors for The Heron's Nest.

At its best, her haiku serve up surprises from the natural world and are evocative of the complexities of human interaction and emotion. Other favorites in this collection:

reaching for green pears —
the pull
of an old scar

The hint of inexperience and immaturity suggested in 'green' gives deeper resonance to the pull of the old scar. And the immediacy of:

piano lesson
her braids outdo
the metronome

I am captivated by the image of those braids beating time, and the play of outdo with its suggestion of hairdo gone wild.

29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life, Cami Walker (nonfiction)

2010-01-15T06:57:00.000-08:00

Cami Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a month after her marriage. Understandably devastated, within the first two years of diagnosis she was sinking into a psychological abyss as the disease changed how she saw herself and what she was able to do. At her lowest point, a friend -- a medicine woman and spiritual adviser named Mbali -- suggested she give 29 gifts over 29 days.

This book about giving was a gift from my sister, so it is fitting that I begin my year of reading women with it. As I followed Cami Walker on her journey -- how she came to it reluctantly, how it transformed her days so she looked beyond her losses to others and discovered what she had to offer -- I admired her fortitude and her struggle to be open to the small blessings of life. It is a cautionary tale on the transience of life, but I found myself wanting less memoir and more reflection on giving. Nonetheless as her website and many television appearances attest, many have been inspired to give more of him or herself as a result. And that's a gift.