Age of Wonders, poems by Lawrence Kessenich (Big Table Publishing, 2016)
Reviewed by Denise Provost
In Black Swans, for
instance, the setting is straight out of a fairy tale – a visit to a daughter
spending “a semester in a castle –transformed/into a college campus ….” Contemplating
the black swans (“known to chase visitors/across the broad lawns, honking
madly”) in the moat, the narrator contemplates the grown child who has “we
suspect, taken a professor/ for a lover.”
What to think of such a turn? What is the device that will
move us from here to the happy ending we’ve been primed to anticipate? With a
profound and subtle turn the narrator reveals that “[p]art of me would like to
be
angry at this dark prince of
learning, but I
can’t be sure I’d be able to
resist,
if I taught young women, the
temptation
to wind myself around them like
the lithe, muscular neck of a
black swan.
Besides, our sons and daughters
sail their own
moats, honking madly if we get too
close.
It’s their castle and they will
defend it.
Like so many of Kessenich’s poems, Black Swans is a masterpiece of equipoise, its elements twining
into a perfect balance of emotional insights. It’s evident in The Buddha’s Shoulder, one of two
meditations on the narrator’s relationship with a wooden figure of the teacher
whose name is almost synonymous with enlightenment. This statute is one which
has, quite literally, been lightened: “faded by morning sun./The nut-brown wood
has turned blonde,/like a washed out dye job.”
The narrator confesses:
Being less compassionate, and more
attached
to things remaining as they are,
I’m bothered
by these blond patches on the Buddha’s
image.
I’ve considered retouching him
with a stain….
The great teacher’s lessons having been? seen as? too
powerful for such interference, the narrator considers that
Perhaps I’ll learn to meditate on
his
imperfect shoulder, his marred
knee, come to
accept that life is a long, slow
fade toward death.
There Is no self-pity, no melodrama in the tone of this poem,
or in other poems contemplating the trajectory of life to its end – or even
beyond. A poem which undertakes the latter course is the extraordinary Afterlife. I know of several readers
whose reaction to this breathtaking poem has been to say that they wanted to
read it at the memorial service of a loved one, or have it read at their own. Afterlife reimagines the Biblical seven
days of creation as a creative deconstruction:
Day
3
Your individuality begins
to melt like the Wicked
Witch of the West, all your
beautiful wickedness –and
you do see its beauty as
it goes –melting in a puddle
at what was once your feet.
It’s surprising to find such a spirit of equanimity in any
collection of contemporary poetry, but it consistently manifests in this
collection. When, in the poem The Zen of
Mescaline, the narrator says “[m]y identity slips the leash of form,” we recognize the
cast of mind that unifies this work. It is one which is open to the particulars
of experience, its marvels and mysteries, with a deep acceptance and a
self-aware, sly humor.
In the title poem, a scene of natural beauty at an ancient
cultural site is interrupted by the rumble of a jet:
….Immediately
my mind goes to dissatisfaction
with the world of whining engines
and progress.
It is then the ancients speak to me:
“You live
In an age of wonders. Enjoy
them!”….
It
may not be possible to read these poems and not absorb even a little of the
attitude of even-handed appreciation they convey.
Lines from these poems may bubble up into the ordinary, the tedious, the
vexing, and even the painful episodes of life, with little breaths of patience
and peace. Who knows? Wider dissemination of these poems may help make America
grateful again – for, after all, we live in an age of wonders.
