Great Pond Poems by Ed Meek

The Depths of Great Pond by Ed Meek

Review by Laura Cherry

As in the eponymous Great Pond, there is much more going on beneath the surface of Ed Meek’s most recent poetry collection than first meets the eye. What begins as a series of lyrical meditations on nature evolves into a commentary on relationships, longing, grief, missed chances, art, and the fraught political landscape.

Deft nature poems invite readers into the book, introducing us to the poet’s landscape: pond, bay, harbor, and woods.

the sun splits the trees and lifts me with its light

as surely as wings lift a bird.

“June”

The flora and fauna of New England are on brilliant display here, particularly our variety of native birds, from the quotidian (robins, jays) to the breathtaking (herons, goldfinches, ospreys). Meek captures the childlike awe we can feel from a close encounter with, say, a starfish: “Those tiny stems / beneath the arms / are legs!” (“Asteroidea”)

Meek’s poems emit a muted longing: for the past, for beauty, for a better world than the one we’ve made.

Now those few wild horses who are left alone

Seem unaware of what we’ve done.

Yet I can’t help but smile watching them run.

“Mustangs”

From a placid beginning, the collection moves into sometimes-troubled stories of family, youthful hijinks, and terrible losses. One of the collection’s most powerful pieces is the brief “The Death of a Child,” breathtaking in its stark simplicity.

Great Pond is enlivened by wry descriptions of time-honored New England pastimes: walking the dog on a sleety afternoon, being forced off the road by a sudden squall, searching a loved one’s skin for Lyme-carrying ticks, sneezing through pollen season, and, my favorite, trying to cross Mass Ave:

6700 died last year, my wife says

pushing the useless button

at the crosswalk.

“Pedestrian”

In the book’s later poems, Covid lockdown memories piercingly recreate those insular, foggy times, with the virus “[going] room to room / through nursing homes / separating

souls from bodies” [“In the Provinces”]. Several pieces on painters and poets (Warhol, Haring, Ginsberg) comment on the way outsider art reflects aspects of our society that we may not want to see – “faces are masks / the authorities use to identify / enemies of the state” (“Basquiat”). Meditations on our broken political system and embattled neighborhoods express sympathy with those who have been harmed and a deep fear for what we are, collectively, facing.

It’s a great weight

to carry the future

on our backs

like mules.

“The Burden”

“Freedom and the Dignity it Contains” ends the collection by calling on Abraham Lincoln’s example as one we need to heal our divided country: “He stood firm to all assaults / as if already carved in rock.” At a time when “agents must learn to ignore / the crying and screams” of detainees (“Asylum”), and “We always assume / the suspects armed and dangerous” (“Wanted: A Few Good Men”), Meek looks to Lincoln for the “seeds of hope” we need to find our own courage, conviction, and moral center.

Like a true New Englander, Meek’s Great Pond is quiet, with hidden depths, and well worth spending time with.

Great Pond, by Ed Meek. Kelsay Books, 2026 https://www.amazon.com/Great-Pond-Ed-Meek/dp/B0GKVG6TSL

Step On Up: Lawrence Kessenich’s Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

 Step On Up: Lawrence Kessenich’s Hard Times Require Furious Dancing

by Laura Cherry

As a poet, it feels increasingly difficult for me to respond to the times we’re in. I cringe, at best, when I open a news site or glance at a newspaper. The stories that aren’t horrific or overwhelming seem petty and gratuitous – it’s not, let’s say, a fertile environment for creativity. It’s easy to be jaded and even easier to be silent. 

So it was with gratitude and respect that I read Lawrence Kessenich’s Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, a collection whose very title gives us a primer for navigating our difficult present and what is yet to come. I’ve long admired Kessenich’s poems, but for me this is truly the moment, and the collection, for his work to shine. Somehow, he can look at our mixed-up, often menacing world and manage to see the furious dancing all around us.

The dichotomy in the book’s title weaves through its themes of celebration and mourning. For every sorrow, there is a strand of joy. Life and death are co-present even in the most placid vacation scene:

The living cool off in the sea breeze

while the dead float high above.

“No Day at the Beach”

Kessenich is a magpie collector of odd, shiny bits: much of his work springs from quotes, overheard anecdotes, and unusual news items. He sets poems in his back yard and half a world away. He taps into the wonder of our beloved, beleaguered planet, its trees, stars, bees, oceans, lambs, daffodils, mountains, glaciers, and one unfortunate possum. He captures the delicious promise in a bag holding a cookie and a slice of lemon cake from Hi-Rise Bakery, and, on a magical evening, the once-in-a-lifetime realization that “to my astonishment, the planets have aligned for me.”

This is by no means to say that Kessenich’s work is all frolic and froth. On the contrary, these poems are full of both the timely and the timeless trials we face: aging and mortality, natural disasters, political chasms, disease, loneliness, despair. “Zoom-Size” wryly identifies our technology-based alienation from each other:

Everyone in the real world now was

far too big, lifted up on legs that went

all the way down to the ground, 

heads like Halloween pumpkins.

Kessenich doesn’t sugar-coat: this world, this life, this Anthropocene era – they are brutal. But there are compensations. Like beauty. Music. Friendship. And laughter, as in the one-two punch of certain titles and first lines:

Stealing Flowers from the Buddha

He didn’t need them. (Does he need anything?)

Theology

It does seem that God asks a hell of a lot.

Guardian Angels

They were stuck with us, I guess.

Though squarely facing the darkness, these poems are radiant, drawing on a range of spiritual traditions for solace and peace. And they are suffused with love for family, friends, and strangers, who show up here in portraits that reveal their eccentric glory. Kessenich tells his human stories with tenderness and awe, even as he anticipates the post-human hour when “the wind / will blow frictionless across our history.”

Reading this collection brought me back to what I love about this life. It gave me a respite from my own circuitous thoughts, and some glimmers of hope to replace them.

Hard times? Check. Bring on the furious dancing, stat. And read this book.

https://www.lawrence-writer.com/store/p11/Hard_Times_Require_Furious_Dancing_%28Poetry_-_Big_Table_Press%29.html

Chief Jay Strongbow is Real: Timothy Gager Hungers for Truth

Taking its title and prevailing metaphor from a faux-native wrestler who was “arguably the biggest racist gimmick in history,” Timothy Gager’s new collection, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real, sets out to debunk our tidy, comfortable myths and cut through romantic and cultural illusions. The book is set in eight “Acts” that take on loaded topics like politics, addiction and sobriety, love and its demise, family, and poetry itself. 

The collection’s introduction and opening poems indict the actions of those currently in power (“sign the contracts / then set the tap water on fire”), but he’s equally allergic to simplistic or idealistic solutions from the other side:

The most radical revolutions

Become conservative

The day after the revolution

(“Me Thinks we Protest”)

Gager’s poems are disruptive and clever, full of his characteristic wordplay: “What doesn’t kill you makes you thinner,” “as a fly crows,” and, most light-heartedly:

You know you slay me

so what?

I have dragon breath

(“Loose Flowers”)

Gager is also bold and funny in his skewering of consumer culture (seventies style):

Take Sominex tonight and sleep

after Coke and a smile

is how you spell relief

(“I Feel Good About Amerika”)

The collection punctures the balloon of romance and easy intimacy (“this / dating is either gaga or nothing”) but still allows for the hope of deep connection “like a worn t-shirt / is a perfect imperfection.” Silly posturing is off the table here, but love remains a comfort.

In a world of counterfeits, compromise, disappointment and disgust (which extends even to the self: “today at the beach, my patience / vanished like waves taking turns”), the clearest story to tell may be of the adolescent hollowness that cannot be assuaged. Hunger, at least, is true, and memory doesn’t soften it.

At age sixteen, a hundred and forty pounds

An empty pit, my ribs stuck out like a step ladder

My toothpick arms with bulbous hinges

I think it impossible to fill my stomach

(“When I Think of my Childhood”)

With its distrust of smug certainties and empty nostalgia, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real might help us sharpen our own gaze, see more clearly, and act simply and boldly: “Cook a meal. / Plant a garden.” If there’s a message here, it is to look for truth and to persist. “By no means stop.”


--Laura Cherry