WRAPPING UP ANOTHER Poetry Week here at Loads of Learned Lumber, and it was a good one. Every volume was good, and two might be masterpieces: Timothy Donnelly's The Problem of the Many and this one. I am moving Joanna Klink up into my contemporary American poetry pantheon.
Briefly described, the book is about loss (a painful breakup, a 90-year-old blue spruce uprooted by a windstorm, the death of her father) and looking at the night sky. That is, the book is about two of poetry's most ancient and foundational themes. So why does it seem so fresh and original?
Mainly because of Klink's always surprising language, I think. "Motors carry you, / or feet pull you forward / in cool dispersals of color." Or: "the ground doves in their murmuring feathers." Or: "Devotion is full of arrows."
Perhaps also because of her idiosyncratic spirituality, which might show up as a strange prayer:
Please. Give us birds.
A light unto the world. An undistorted,
ancient ornament--some swift way
out of the earth.
Where the stones are laid.
Where we are laid.
Or that she would wrote a poem called "New Year" that includes the statement "it was already too late"--and then the poem (I think) turns out to be an update of that classic of belatedness, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."
Or just the ambition of "Night Sky," a long poem (or sequence, I'm not sure) about looking at the night sky that slowly becomes a poem about everything.
The republic may be going to hell, but our poetry remains worthwhile. It's something.
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