Thorny by Judith Baumel

Ruth Baumel

  

Judith Baumel, Thorny.  Arrowsmith. 2022. 122 pp. $22.00

Review by Ruth Hoberman

 

            Recently I’ve been thinking about land acknowledgments—those statements that precede many poetry events these days, recognizing our complicity in the violent confiscation of the land we stand on.  Judith Baumel’s recent collection Thorny, while not overtly political, performs some of the same work—complicating our sense of who we are by insisting on the layers beneath.  Thorny is thorny in the best ways:  tangled, resistant, resilient, complex, deeply rooted in landscape and its histories.

            “Passeggiate,” the book’s first section, is set mainly in Italy—the place Baumel describes in interviews as her “happy spot,” and where she taught as a Fulbright scholar.  “Passeggiate” is Italian for “stroll”:  the poems suggest the rewards of walking, looking, absorbing; but each at some point also digs beneath the moment into the past.  In “Hic Adelfia Clarissima Femina,” for example, a contemporary observer describes the elaborately carved sarcophagus of Adelfia, at Syracuse: “I want to look this way and be looked at this way,” she says, of the husband and wife carved into a fluted shell at the sarcophagus’s center:

Turned toward each other but askew, as if the planes

of our shoulders were made for different

vanishing points and still impose flesh

on each other’s flesh. 

Husband and wife exist in different planes and will, in death, be separated, but with effort come together in life:  “I find him in sleep/from another country, a momentary act of will.”  The reward of “crossing the border to seek that sheltering coast” is sensual intimacy, ample compensation for the “thorny labor of marriage.”  But then the poem shifts its focus as a piece of music might change key: looking backwards to Eden, where joy was already inseparable from suffering.  “When He damned the soil into which we return,/Yahweh gave us the mercy of pains in birth and bread.” 

            These shifts add context and poignancy.  In “Passeggiate and Cena in Erice” (Stroll and Dinner in Erice), for example, sightseers admire cobblestones, shops, flower pots;  but here, too, the present is haunted by “the petitions of the past,” when  intruders arrived in waves—“came and left their Y chromosomes with the Ierodule,” the local priestess-prostitutes. Then the poem returns to dinner:  swordfish and couscous. “The local salt,” its speaker concludes, “was almost rosy, almost sweet/with iodine and tasted of sacrifice.”

            Literary and mythological figures turn up as speakers in some poems.  Meliboeus and Tityrus, for example, arrive from Virgil’s first eclogue to talk over 9/11, placing our disaster in the context of Augustus Caesar’s land confiscations following the Civil War.  And in “On the Death of Boys,” the three Greek Fates discuss motherhood and loss with Nyx, Greek goddess of night.  “What were the boys thinking?” Nyx asks, of four teenage boys from the Bronx who drowned in an ill-judged effort to row a boat from City Island to Hart Island on a January night.  Clotho (who spins the thread of life), Lachesis (who measures), and Atropos (who snips) point out the role of bad judgment as well as the ironies provided by Hart Island’s history: “a heap/of bad ideas,” it has been a prison, a hospital, and a Potter’s Field. “Stop,” Nyx interrupts, giving voice to modern as well as ancient mothers’ complaints: “You spin their flesh, measure their nine months, cut the cord so they are not ours.” Don’t finish your sentence, she begs.  But Clotho has the last word, relentless, insistent on the cyclicity of life and death. 

            The book’s second section, “The American Cousins A-Z,” is lighter, brisker, in its portrait of Jewish immigrant life, though here, too, history haunts:  In  “Proem: ‘A Vort Far a Vort’” (the Yiddish title of a book by Scholem Aleichem), we learn of those who stayed behind, blurred figures in the German photographs documenting their slaughter.  But each had a name, the speaker insists;  each, in fact, was a “library of infinity.”  In the poems that follow, scenes speed by of Catskill resorts, Alexander’s department store, conversations in which the cousins exhibit their acculturation and their anxiety at once. “Long treks ended for the lucky/in this land of pizza,” Baumel notes in “Z: Ziggurat.”

            More specifically, “long treks” end in the Bronx, where many of the book’s final poems are set.  In this final section, “Bound,” the journeys are in time, not space.  “I am assembling those who are gone like a doll party,” one speaker says.  The culmination is “Gueule de Bois” (Hangover), a gorgeous summation of wonder and regret.  Here the speaker contemplates her past by way of Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting of Suzanne Valadon looking glum beside a bottle of wine.  “Plenty of mistakes we see coming/and can’t stop, won’t stop,” she says, thinking of her own hangovers long ago.  But now, “a hangover is about time”—the way past moments return, “the way/the smell and the pour bring distant ghosts/forward to the spilled circle, bring regret and promises to bear against the future.” Is what happened next something we could have changed?  Or are we “bound”?  Anyone of a certain age looks back and wonders.  And here both poem and book end, with a hypothetical, poignant supposition:  “As if, perhaps, the future just proceeds/upon the street, the cold of April rain/on the rangy disappointments of forsythia.”

            Baumel’s title sent me back to Wordsworth’s 1789 “The Thorn,” where a thorn tree grows beside a moss-covered mound, the grave of an infant possibly murdered by its betrayed mother. “A mass of knotted joints . . . bound/With heavy tufts of moss that strive/To drag it to the ground,” that tree strikes me as an apt image for these poems.  Laden with the past, they speak in a strange, allusive, often beautiful language, reminding us that the earth is littered with such burials.

John Okrent, This Costly Season

 

 

            John Okrent, This Costly Season.  Arrowsmith.  2021. 62 pp. $20.00

             Review by Ruth Hoberman

 

            In March 2020, the Northwest and the Northeast shared a peculiar horror: that first onslaught of deathly ill people, the sirens and scrambling for masks and ventilators, the fear of contagion—all weirdly juxtaposed with daffodils and nesting birds.  John Okrent’s recent collection of sonnets, This Costly Season, recreates the anxiety, despair, and rare glimmers of hope so many of us felt during that time.

            A physician as well as a poet, Okrent practices family medicine at a community health center in Tacoma, Washington—the state where the first coronavirus case in the United States was confirmed on January 21, followed in late February by the first death. By March 17, the date of Okrent’s first poem (each poem is titled only by its date), the U.S. death toll had surpassed one hundred:  “Driving to clinic,” the poem opens, “—on the radio a pulmonologist/in Italy tells of choosing among the dying/which ones not to save.”  Fear is becoming the norm.  The gun shop is packed, the poem notes, and “Everyone’s eyes seemed wider/above their face masks.”

            Okrent’s experiences as a doctor give him credibility, but he turns his attention mainly to what he sees going to and from the clinic, and to the pandemic’s impact on his family.  “Home from clinic,” he writes in “March 19, 2020,”  “I throw my clothes/straight in the wash and get in the shower/before I touch my wife and daughter.”  He’d like to think he can protect his family:  “From our cabin we keep the world,” the poem opens.  But its ending acknowledges that home can’t be partitioned off:  “In our cabin we keep the world.” The poem that follows, “March 20, 2020,” elaborates on our interconnectedness, “We keep the world, the world keeps us.” And “March 27, 2020”:  “If you die, I die too.”    

            Okrent’s book is subtitled A Crown of Sonnets, evoking the sonnet’s long history of exploring love and time. While his poems deviate from the traditional rhyme scheme and meter, they retain the form’s fourteen lines, meditative pace, and narrow focus.  Some include internal rhymes, and many end with a turn or summation that has some of the feel of Shakespeare’s concluding couplets.  Most powerful, though, is the repetitive impact of the crown:  as one poem’s last line becomes the first line of the next poem, the scene darkens and intensifies.  That first poem, for example, which opens with the Italian pulmonologist, shifts to an image of Walt Whitman tending to Union soldiers amid “the smell of dead/or dying flesh. And in all the dooryards, the smell of lilacs.” The image evokes the book’s project as a whole—to salvage what there is of beauty during fearful times.  But it also sets us up for the poem’s ending, which imagines the man working at the busy gun shop in his “latex gloves the color of lilacs, only darker.”  And then “March 18, 2020” opens “The color of lilacs, only darker—the clouds/that cover the top of Mt. Rainier this evening/like a shroud.”  Those echoing lines create a sense of claustrophobia, of consequences unfolding, of contagion.  

            Okrent’s title comes from W. D. Snodgrass’s “April Inventory,” a poem quoted in the book’s epigraph and again in “April 20, 2020”:

            That time of year when every crow you see

            carries clump of hair or twig or tuft of down

            into the trees. They brood and hover

            over our duress while spring repays last summer’s

            debts. “We shall afford our costly seasons,” said Snodgrass.

            But this one?  Like a stain, desperation seeps into things:

            the grocery bag, the steering wheel, little hand

            in my hand, midnight bowl of cereal.

Spring’s bank account is full; our own, emptied by loss. The allusion to Shakespeare’s “That Time of Year” is equally bleak:  Shakespeare links winter, fall, and twilight to the approach of death. For Okrent, however, death is already there at daybreak: “The mist hangs low around the whole horizon/like the lid of an eye that’s closing. But it’s only morning.”

            Unless morning means there’s time still to hope?  Okrent’s forty-eight sonnets mention disasters besides the pandemic—the murder of George Floyd, hurricanes, wildfire, a divisive President—and also hints of change, like the Black Lives Matter movement. In “June 1, 2020,” he calls for “more gentle/more genital, more wrestling with angels, more asphyxia’s opposite.”  “June 5, 2020” notes, of a protestor knocked down by police, “blood leaked like a secret from his ear.”  And the next begins, “From the ear, to please the muses, music/reaches for more music”; the speaker and his family, newly tested for Covid, visit family “for the first time in months.” Ultimately, Okrent suggests, in the book’s final poem, “Nothing is wasted,/love least of all.”  That poem concludes, as so many others have begun, with the words “Driving to clinic.”  But this time, there is no mist like the “lid of an eye that’s closing.”  Instead, “day breaks its glass of light on the harbor/and I take it—like a chance—like a cure.”

            With their repetitive box-like form and those reverberating final lines, Okrent’s poems are at times despairing, but always graceful and controlled. There’s a muffled quality to them that I found added to their impact, as if the speaker were too stunned to probe too deeply or to let loose emotionally.  If, in ten years, we’ve forgotten what these last few years have felt like, This Costly Season will be there to remind us:  “I bow my head to the gun/of the infrared thermometer, then enter the clinic” (“April 23, 2020”).

Manimal Woe by Fanny Howe

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