All Time Acceptable
Spring Berman
Grolier Poetry Press 2012
42 PP
$17
Review by Myles Gordon
The
Grolier Poetry Book Shop provides the region with something few metropolitan
areas have: a must visit, must peruse spot for anyone who takes their
literature seriously. Since taking reins of the store, owner Ifeanyi Menkiti
has added a new layer of relevance to the dusty box of a place: The Grolier
Discovery Award, a publishing venture that brings deserving, unknown voices to
the forefront. One of those voices is Spring Berman who won the prize with her
quirky, witty collection, All Time
Acceptable.
Berman, Menkiti points out in the book’s forward, is that
most rare breed: a poet who is also a scientist – and not just any scientist.
No weekend dabbler with a chemistry set, she. Berman is an academic roboticist –
whatever that is - at Arizona State University. She holds a B.S.E. in
mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering from Princeton, a Ph.D. from
UPenn, and has done post-doctoral work at Harvard. Her CV shows she’s penned
articles called A
Reachability
Algorithm for Multi-Affine Systems with Applications to Biological Systems,
and Navigation-Based
Optimization of Stochastic Strategies for Allocating a Robot Swarm Among
Multiple Sites.
Writing poetry may not be rocket science, but Berman is a rocket scientist who
writes poetry, delightfully weaving scientific concepts and lingo into her
musings on life, love, the universe, and everything.
In “Psychic,
Physicist,” a poem focused in part on a mismatched relationship between science
and superstition, she writes:
…I have meager
appetite
for the rare
convulsions of light spied in glass
or patterned cards, as
though days are die-cast
well before the flare
of groping palm reveals
their dreaded
contours; or hoarsening, rudely
tugging barb from
quill, I would have denied
that the limping of
the spheres applied to him,
he whose mathematics
strung a canopy
of tempting universes.
Her
credentials show here. Her subtle use of mathematical and scientific allusions
impress, as well as entertain, the reader.
Her poem
with the delicious title “The professor emeritus of mathematics, leaning into
the slow wheel of dawn until the sparrows stop,” leads the reader into musings
of the eternal, again, through mathematical theory:
As for departure, I
never fought it,
but rather named it,
let it seize and spare
my exponentials and my
oscillations,
watching from the
chair. After such years,
it might not be too
terrible to see
the undisputed
flatness of this world
from the top of the
Riemann sphere
Impressive, too, the mathematics of her rhymes: “spare,”
“chair,” “years” and “sphere” surrounding the lovely cadence of “exponentials”
and oscillations.” There is no glossary – but to be fair it would add another
twenty pages to the volume – but it does help to keep Google handy. Even if,
like this reviewer, the reader doesn’t know the meaning of “Riemann sphere,”
one can guess it’s something big and dynamic, something that leads to
resolution, perhaps a mystical one, adding a lovely intrigue to the ending.
Certainly
the Harvard/Princeton/advanced science vocabulary propels the book and can
sometimes intimidate with its million dollar words. But this is a deep, brave collection
that intimately portrays a strong woman’s maneuvering of this world. “The
Offering” takes on female objectification, empowering women to take the reins
of potential sensual encounters:
I am withdrawing, sir,
but I have had
a fertile, frank
discussion with my breasts
and they concede to
see you, sir, today
and Friday, at the
hours that suit you best.
In a
moving sonnet, “Adults $5. Children Under 12 Free,” she reminds humanity to
humble itself, and points out an essential human folly: we think we know so
much, when we are in reality just beginning to grasp the shadows:
For being first, we
boast the truest speech,
as no one can deny the
truest voice
to infants, wrenched
from undreamt dreaming, each
permitted daylight by
another’s choice;
What tribes will thank
themselves to see the sun?
Which lands will they
create, and which consume?
These distant clans
unlearn their only tongue
and from our graves
construct a second moon –
Berman’s
construct is wise, intelligent, well rendered and witty. It is a powerful book.
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