What I’m Reading: A Brief History of Time & Lie Awake Lake

39º and bright, shining sun

Due to the huge stack of books waiting to be read, and the drafting I want to do today, here are two mini-mini-reviews, rather than my longer take on books of poetry.

I can’t remember where I first read about Shaindel Beers’ A Brief History of Time, but I do remember her being referred to as a Midwest poet or a rural poet or something along those lines that peaked my interest. Beers’ book is not a book that romanticizes the rural, working-class world, but one that forces us to look at the ultra-real details of a life begun in rural poverty, a life that progresses into the educated, urban, middle-class and all the mixed feelings that progression evokes. Race, class, & gender are at work in nearly every poem.

My four favorite poems from the collection are:
“Elegy for a Past Life”
“Rebuttal Evidence” that begins this way
Because I’ve been loving in my own way all along,
just today, on the drive home from work on that stretch of 12
that still slices through the cornfields…
“Overview of the Carbon Cycle”
“What Will We Do With You? This Bone Has Almost No Flesh Protecting It–” (my favorite) begins
But I am like any porcelain doll, waiting to be destroyed
by a hammer. Brothers do these things
to incite the cries of their sisters. They think
This is power. Someday they will learn that power
is smiling gleefully up at the anvil.

~~~~~

I read about Beckian Fritz Goldberg in an interview with another poet, exactly whom I’ve now forgotten. It turned out that I had an anthology with several of Goldberg’s poems in it, which I read and which inspired me to check out Lie Awake Lake. In this book there are poems that beautifully weave the landscape with the body of the speaker. The poems illuminate loss and grief and, from time to time, joy and celebration.

I once had a student who did not like the use of questions in contemporary poetry, but one of my favorite poems of Goldberg’s does just that (and I must confess I like to question in my poems as well). Here’s the start of “Question As Part of the Body”
The essential question —
what do we ache for, what do we need, how do we get it?

or rephrased: How do we not die?

How do we not see question as
part of the body?

Pain as. Light as.

Other favorites include:
“Back”
“Fourth Month”
“Blossom at the End of the Body”

And I’ll leave you with “Reliquary”

The lid sighed backward
it was a perfect fit
with the scent of laburnum and saints
as if the box, open,
addressed the physical world
the box being a snapdragon
in the hands
of the blossom thief: the boy in
the hands of a future
looking inside
what if he saw tonight
the firecracker thrown in the corner store
busting open a box of chili powder
smoke and red dust
and suddenly we’re all breathing in
desire and repulsion
because the open takes
something from us, but
Mr. Eros, you
ain’t got a finger to stand on
not like a female saint
whose thumb is a shrine,
upright and petrified and guarded
by glass, permanently
testing the inner
atmosphere.

Support poetry! Buy or Borrow a copy of these books today!
Shaindel Beers
A Brief History of Time
Salt Publishing, 2009

Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Lie Awake Lake
Oberlin College Press, 2005