This was my first time reading Irish poet Mary O’Malley. Nature looms large in her tenth collection, as in several of the other books I’ve reviewed heThis was my first time reading Irish poet Mary O’Malley. Nature looms large in her tenth collection, as in several of the other books I’ve reviewed here, with poems about flora and fauna. “Late Swallow” is a highlight (“your loops and dives leave ripples in the air, / a winged Matisse, painting with scissors”) and the title’s reference is to dogfish – what’s in a name, eh? The meticulous detail in her descriptions made me think of still lifes, as did a mention of an odalisque. Other verse is stimulated by Greek myth, travel to Lisbon, and the Gaelic language. Sections are devoted to pandemic experiences (“Another Plague Season”) and to technology. “The Dig” imagines what future archaeologists will make of our media. I noted end and internal rhymes in “April” and the repeated sounds and pattern of stress of “clean as a quiver of knives.” O’Malley has a light touch but leaves a big impression.
(3.5) Phillips is a prolific poet I’d somehow never heard of. In fact, he won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his selected poetry volume. He’s gay an(3.5) Phillips is a prolific poet I’d somehow never heard of. In fact, he won the Pulitzer Prize last year for his selected poetry volume. He’s gay and African American, and in his evocative verse he summons up landscapes and a variety of weather, including as a metaphor for emotions – guilt, shame, and regret. Looking back over broken relationships, he questions his memory. Will I remember individual poems? Unlikely. But the sense of chilly, clear-eyed reflection, yes.
For PKD Awareness Day (the author and I both have polycystic kidney disease), my early Shelf Awareness review: Eiren Caffall’s debut is an ardent elegFor PKD Awareness Day (the author and I both have polycystic kidney disease), my early Shelf Awareness review: Eiren Caffall’s debut is an ardent elegy for her illness-haunted family and for the ailing marine environments that inspire her.
For centuries, the author’s family has been subject to “the Caffall Curse.” Polycystic kidney disease, a degenerative genetic condition, causes fluid-filled cysts to proliferate in a person’s enlarged kidneys. PKD can involve pain, fatigue, high blood pressure, kidney failure, and a heightened risk of brain aneurysm. Given Caffall’s paternal family history, she expected to die before age 50.
Caffall’s melancholy memoir spotlights moments that opened her eyes to medical and environmental catastrophe. In 1980, when she was nine years old, she and her parents vacationed at a rental cottage on Long Island Sound. They nicknamed the pollution-ridden site “Dogshit Beach”—her mother spent idyllic summers there as a child, yet now “both the ecosystem and my father were slipping away.” For the first time, Caffall became aware of her father’s suffering and lack of energy. She realized that she, too, might have inherited PKD and could face similar struggles as an adult.
In 2014, Caffall, then a single mother, took her nine-year-old son, Dex, on vacation to the Gulf of Maine. During the trip, she had a fall that prompted a seizure, and she and Dex were evacuated from Monhegan Island by Coast Guard ship. Although no further seizures ensued and no clear cause emerged, the crisis served as a wake-up call, reminding her of how serious PKD is and that it might afflict her son as well.
The book draws fascinating connections between personal experiences and ecological threats. Caffall structures her story as a gallery of endangered marine animals such as the Longfin Inshore Squid and Humpback Whale, tracing their history and exposing the dangers they face in degraded environments. Red tides (massive algal blooms) and floods are apt metaphors for physical trials: “the Sound was dying, hypoxic … from an overwhelm of nutrients flooding an ecosystem—nitrogen, phosphorus, imbalanced saline—the same things that overwhelm a body when kidneys can no longer filter blood properly.”
Re-created scenes enliven accounts of family illness and therapeutic developments. The lyrical hybrid narrative, informed by scientific journals and government publications, is as impassioned about restoring the environment as it is about ensuring equality of access to health care. Personal and species extinction are just cause for “permanent mourning,” Caffall writes, but adapting to change keeps hope alive.
(Out on October 15. Posted with permission from Shelf Awareness.)...more
These 41 poems, each limited to one stanza and one page, are named for their first lines, like hymns. With their old-fashioned lyricism and precise naThese 41 poems, each limited to one stanza and one page, are named for their first lines, like hymns. With their old-fashioned lyricism and precise nature vocabulary, they are deeply rooted in place and animated by frequent rhetorical questions. Birds and fields, livestock and wildfires: Goodan marks where human interest and the natural world meet, or sometimes clash. He echoes Emily Dickinson (“After great patience, a small bird comes”) and also reminds me of Keith Taylor. The pages are rain-soaked and ghost-haunted, creating a slightly melancholy atmosphere. Unusual phrasing and alliteration stand out: “on the field / A fallow calm falls / Leaving the soil / To its feraling.” He’s a new name for me though this is his seventh collection; I’d happily read more. [After I read the book I looked at the blurb. I got … none of that from my reading, so be aware that it’s very subtle.]
(4.5) Nancy Miller Gomez’s debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming; tornadoes and cicadas. But her remembere(4.5) Nancy Miller Gomez’s debut collection recalls a Midwest girlhood of fairground rides and lake swimming; tornadoes and cicadas. But her remembered Kansas is no site of rose-tinted nostalgia. “Missing History” notes how women’s stories, such as her grandmother’s, are lost to time. A pet snake goes missing and she imagines it haunting her mother. And in “Tilt-A-Whirl,” her older sister’s harmless flirtation with a ride operator turns sinister:
we went faster, and faster, though by then we had begun to scream Stop!
Please stop! Until our voices grew hoarse beneath the clattering pivots and dips,
the air filling with diesel and cigarettes, and the man at the control stick, waiting for us
to spin toward him again, and each time he cocked his hand as if sighting prey down the barrel of a gun.
“Mothering” likewise eschews the cosy for images of fierce protection. The poet documents the death of her children’s father and abides with a son enduring brain scans and a daughter in recovery from heroin addiction. She wreaks “Vengeance” on a cheating husband and lives through her parents’ deaths. Gomez also takes ideas from the headlines, with poems about the Ukraine invasion, species extinction, and an unsolicited dick pic shared via the cloud in a subway car. There is a prison setting in two poems in a row – she has taught Santa Cruz County Jail poetry workshops.
I particularly appreciated “The Invisible Mother,” inspired by the Victorian practice of photographing children with their mothers hidden in the background; “Heavens to Betsy,” concerning her mother’s love of sayings (my mother, too; a favourite exclamation was “Great Caesar’s ghost!”); and “Domain,” about her fascination with her body, even as it ages:
Crow’s feet and cackle lines. The foundation of my face settling in for the long haul, each year my body becoming more and more familiar.
The alliteration and slant rhymes are to die for, and I love the cover (Owl Collage by Alexandra Gallagher) and the frequent bird metaphors. There’s an edge of sadness and danger that reminds me of Lo by Melissa Crowe. I recognized much of the emotional territory of childhood, as I did with Sarah Manguso’s Very Cold People, even if the particulars are very different from my own upbringing. It’s always exciting to discover a writer who sees the world in the same way as I do, and can write about it in gorgeous verse....more
