Kate Daniels, Chloe Honum, and Corey Van Landingham
Poetry has at all times grappled with these issues. The magnificent Webb pictures, in actual fact, learn to me like poems: advanced, dramatic, manifold of their immensities and their intimacies. “The Mind,” Emily Dickinson writes, “is wider than the Sky.”
The three collections of poetry I’d wish to convey into constellation for this version of Second Acts — a column which usually brings collectively a second e book of poems printed at the least 20 years in the past with one or two just lately printed second books — are every, of their respective methods, involved with the resilience and limits of the human spirit in confrontation with enormity, with inhuman (or seemingly inhuman) forces: the gods, nature, know-how. Kate Daniels’s The Niobe Poems maps the tragic loss of a kid by drowning onto the parable of Niobe, whose delight in her personal youngsters causes the goddess Leto to have them callously murdered. In The Lantern Room, Chloe Honum tracks a younger lady’s peripatetic journey to restoration within the wake of her mom’s suicide and the top of a love affair. And in Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, Corey Van Landingham nods to Walter Benjamin’s “angel of historical past” to jot down concerning the risks human beings pose to themselves: conflict, torture, and applied sciences of surveillance.
Kate Daniels’s first e book of poems, The White Wave, received the 1983 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was printed by the College of Pittsburgh Press in 1984, when Daniels was 31 years outdated. Over her lengthy profession, she has garnered a bunch of awards, printed many books, taught at a number of universities, and was a founding editor of Poetry East. In her essay “The Curious Energy of Poetry,” Daniels recounts how, shortly after publishing her first e book and getting ready to jot down a second assortment as a Bunting Fellow in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the tragic information of her younger nephew’s drowning in Virginia precipitated her to lose religion for a time in each the studying and writing of poems. Lastly, in an try to ask poetry again into her life, Daniels started to renew the rituals of writing, of sitting on the desk, even when phrases wouldn’t come:
As a result of I couldn’t work out the rest to do, I simply saved returning to my desk, and to the rituals and practices of studying and writing that had structured my life and soothed my psyche and delighted my soul for so long as I might keep in mind. Follow and repetition, observe and repetition, I muttered to myself in my head as if I used to be an athlete in coaching. If nothing else, it gave me one thing to do. It structured the times that had misplaced their form, and acted as a guard rail in opposition to the psychological and non secular abyss that stretched earlier than me. To some small extent, it briefly derailed the obsessive grieving that generally saved me in mattress for days. Simply going by means of the traces, it appeared, prevented me from tipping over the sting. I can’t recall now if I had religion that poetry would come again to me, or not. However I used to be sure that if I didn’t preserve the lights on, inviting it house, poetry would by no means come again.
After two years of going by means of the motions, the spark of her second assortment arrived “partly by chance and partly by effort.” Whereas getting ready a lecture about archetypal metaphor on a snowy bus trip north, Daniels got here throughout the story of Niobe. The picture of a mortal lady turned to weeping stone by the merciless whims of the gods gave Daniels a scaffolding for her personal narrative of loss. Impressed, Daniels started to jot down, as if “taking dictation,” what would grow to be The Niobe Poems.
The e book takes an unflinching dive into the psychic trauma and drama of tolerating ache, the narcissism of sexual love, the complexities (cautious hope, obsession, ambivalence, guilt) of motherhood and motherly love, the politics of household life, and the indispensability of fantasy (poetry, fiction) in our makes an attempt to know reality. It’s presciently hybrid, providing varied tellings of the Niobe fantasy (Ovid, Homer, Dante, Hamilton, Graves), “Niobe” poems and testimonies by different poets, and a “Dramatis Personae” record. Daniels contains lyric poems as properly — some exploring the personae of mythic figures, others exploring the non-public household tragedy, and nonetheless extra exploring Niobe-like figures from historic moments such because the Civil Rights Motion and the Vietnam conflict. Some poems convey many of those realms collectively, as in “The Gods Are Non-obligatory”:
The gods sat within the bushes
that night, inexperienced and darkening,
lingering over a final espresso,
espresso with a shot of rum.
The river was speaking to them
however they have been gods and didn’t have
to hear. Even within the bushes
it was sizzling that evening. The leaves weren’t
pleasant as they knew the best way to be.
The gods stirred within the bushes, they seemed
away. The river was speaking
to them extra urgently. “I don’t
need this,” it mentioned. “I don’t want it.”
However the gods had labored sufficient
that day. And the night
was so sizzling the little mortal
flung himself into the water.
Inside the home beside the river,
somebody talked on the phone.
Somebody wrote in a pocket book.
The home windows have been simply openings
nobody occurred to look by means of.
The palms on the clock lurched ahead perpetually.
I’ve at all times thought-about Daniels to be a story poet — story and fantasy are sometimes the engines of her work. However from this poem’s very starting, delicate, modulated hierarchies of sound — these lengthy e’s (bushes, night, inexperienced, espresso), the ring and rustle of current participles (darkening, lingering) — create a lyric spell that evokes Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” and reinforces the uneasy, unsettling utterance of oracle. The relentless enjambments drive house the indifference of the gods, the restlessness of the river, the precarity of the “little mortal.”
The Niobe Poems eschews any try and reconcile or transcend legacies wrought by unfathomable cruelties of destiny, familial abuse, or circumstances of poverty, conflict, and ignorance. However by dwelling in and thru the parable of Niobe, the audio system in these poems come to see that ache, if “cast / into an object outdoors herself” — as in a poem — generally is a place of “invisible scaffoldings / of energy,” a spot of survival and endurance.
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Chloe Honum’s first e book, The Tulip Flame, was chosen by Tracy Okay. Smith for the Cleveland State College Poetry Middle First Ebook Prize and was named the Foreword Critiques Poetry Ebook of the 12 months. She can also be the creator of a chapbook, Then Winter (Bull Metropolis Press, 2017), and her many awards embrace a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. Of Honum’s first e book, I wrote, in a evaluation for Ron Slate’s On the Seawall,
the speaker is protagonist — by turns baby, adolescent, younger grownup — whose mom has tried and finally commits suicide. The realm the narrator inhabits is a welter of emotional trip-wires and penalties that she senses however usually doesn’t but have satisfactory expertise to interpret or articulate.
The speaker in Chloe Honum’s second full-length assortment, The Lantern Room, strikes past the crucible of girlhood and adolescence right into a younger womanhood spent in stressed, anomic landscapes (highways, means stations, motel stops) and the fluorescent rooms of a psychiatric facility. Her motion between these areas reveals the methods during which restoration happens not linearly however, relatively, recursively — intuitively, with a number of begins and pauses. Honum treats psychological sickness, heartbreak, and sorrow with a delicate, nuanced equipoise that contributes to the psychic energy and credibility of her topics, as in “On the Stairs Outdoors the Psychiatric Ward”:
I stand with the boy with the injured physique
whereas the smoke from his cigarette indicators its gradual signature.
He leans on his cane and the cane shakes.
It’s late afternoon, nearly darkish.
We’re day sufferers and shortly will go house.
The boy says, I received into some bother in Texas,
which is so distant it doesn’t appear to exist,
not with what’s occurring now.
Throughout us autumn is throwing
gold and crimson leaves into the road
whereas starlings are holding tight on a phone wire,
heads tucked within the chilly. And the boy
and the Vietnam vet, who has simply joined us,
and I are trying up with craving, as if
we might remedy that string of chicken and sky arithmetic
and know the ages of our souls.
Notice the delicate methods during which Honum respects the emotional and psychological instability of the day sufferers on these liminal stairs, who usually are not precisely in the ward but additionally not but “house.” Like the approaching darkish, they inhabit an “nearly” and unsure house. The smoke from the injured boy’s cigarette makes a “gradual,” tentative signature, like a reputation writ on air or water. His cane shakes, as should the boy who grips it. As nice nature goes by means of its annual gradual and beautiful demise, the starlings — just like the sufferers — maintain on tight and tuck their heads. Winter, inevitably, is coming. The collective craving of Honum’s trio is all of the extra credible and shifting for the methods during which she lets us know that, in issues of the guts, thoughts, and soul, one can’t merely remedy for “x.”
As this poem additionally exhibits, Honum’s work is usually oneiric in its precisions and perceptions. The dreamy rooms of those stanzas are suffused with rain, clouds, snow, feathers, and wings, possessing their very own emotional climate. And simply as highly effective because the poems that happen within the psychiatric facility are those who happen on street journeys, in varied equally liminal motels, greenback shops, and fuel stations, as in “Birthday at a Motel 6”:
The summer time rain takes one final sweep by means of the leaves.
Daylight shimmers on the stones beneath. Within the car parking zone,
two women smoke as they stroll, following the grey scrolls of their breath.
Among the doorways are open to dim rectangular scenes
as intricate as tarot playing cards — Lovers and Fools and Excessive Priestesses.
Above them the wind carries petals over nightfall’s border.
Sparrows hunt for his or her inheritance within the trampled grass.
And my query endures one other 12 months, lit by tiny stars
placing out throughout Arkansas. How will I reside with out her?
The poem is breathtaking in its sly image-making intelligence: These horoscopic tarot card motel rooms! That James Wright– and Rilke-haunted final line! Once more, as within the psych ward stairs poem, Honum doesn’t fake there are epiphanic solutions to the true, courageous questions she poses. But hope persists, as we see on the finish of “The Lighthouse,” a prose poem from which the gathering attracts its title:
There are imaginative and prescient boards displayed alongside one wall. Glancing at them, I believe that if the counselor brings in magazines, scissors, and glue, I’ll sit it out. Too tacky, I inform myself, too juvenile. However that’s not it. I sip my water. Empty, the cup is so gentle it’s arduous to carry. The imaginative and prescient boards are pinned edge to edge, a collection of uncooked hope. I can barely take a look at them, realizing I too would possibly select the daisy, the phrase pleasure in royal blue, or the lighthouse, chopping shakily up the facet of the tower and across the lantern room.
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Corey Van Landingham’s debut poetry e book, Antidote, received The Ohio State College Press/The Journal Award in Poetry and was printed in 2013. It’s a wild, generally uncooked e book, a cosmic petri dish populated by all method of infectious. Unabashedly attractive, surreal, and boldly embodying extremities of all types — in want, in valediction, in grief, in confession — the e book traffics in ecstasies brutal and erotic, for which there’s usually no treatment.
If something, Van Landingham’s second book leans much more intrepidly into the emotional and bodily extremes of Antidote, extending her attain to the egregious territory of American historical past, coverage, and tradition — conflict, terrorism, torture, hypocrisy, the local weather disaster. Drones abound, spying with Sauronian malice.
However there actually isn’t any realm of expertise — popular culture, literature, movie, philosophy, science, astronomy, faith — that appears past the scope of this author’s consideration, intelligence, and interrogation. “Within the 12 months of No Sleep” exhibits the nimbleness with which Van Landingham strikes amongst these realms, seemingly tangentially, solely to tie every thing collectively, loosely, in a sort of dervish dance:
Physics loosened. Materials issues
blurred. At school I noticed
the metallic chair’s particles
transfer. It was all so
Newtonian. I taught the mechanics
of meter to college students nodding
off at evening the Outdated Poets’
syllables stair-stepped
round my room. Why ought to the apple,
requested Newton, at all times
descend perpendicularly to the bottom?
Why ought to the chalk fall
to the linoleum, the stack of papers
fly throughout the ground?
Inelegant actions of the sleepless.
Lengthy nights I’d make my cellphone
brilliant and watch the simulated
inventory ticker make mindless
cash for folks I’ll by no means
see. Throughout the nation males
make invisible machines
in a room, I think about, darkish
and whirring with the noises
their screens emit. In Minot,
North Dakota, as an example, drone
operations goal males
we are going to now not, signed papers say,
torture. We won’t preserve them
from sleep or force-feed them
rectally. We won’t
contact them. As soon as we mastered
gravity wasn’t distance
a factor of the previous. That the earth attracts
it down, the fruit, the flight,
as matter, Newton discovered, attracts the earth
again to it. In California
nights are clear and frenzied.
and within the morning my college students
defined why they dislike
the spondee. For its extreme power.
Threaded all through the e book is a collection of affection letters to varied navy missiles, drones, and techniques operators; there may be additionally a love letter to the president (“I needed to put at your toes the boys I kissed at midnight and press their Austins, Jesses, and Brady’s to your ear. To provide the clear element of historical past. This age, sir, may very well be named for you”). In a riveting lengthy poem that types a central part of the e book, “Pennsylvania Triptych,” Van Landingham takes on the spectacle of historical past that’s Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with its bussed-in college subject journeys, vacationers, and reenactors. And working subtextually all through the gathering is a romantic relationship challenged by geographical distance and ameliorated by sexting:
[…] As soon as the physique turns into a downloadable factor, is it true?
I wake to an image proving that if one rises early sufficient in
Pennsylvania, one would possibly see an worker wiping Hancock’s bronze
Cheek.
That the half represents the entire, on this house, after an evening of no
Communication.
Hoe, mouth, man with hand in mouth: Egyptian hieroglyph for love.
Van Landingham’s poetry is whip-smart and stuffed with wordplay. Take, as an example, the riff on the phrase “publish” in “Put up-,” a poem, partially, concerning the “unlocked” icecaps in a world “Put up-Prince. / The world previously referred to as woolly mammoths / fumbling towards some warmth.” Right here is its ending:
[…] Earlier than I left the town,
post-certainty, post-cash, I posted footage
of my sofa, my bookshelves, my ratty mattress
{that a} stranger carried down three flights
of stairs. I realized a postmodern side-eye,
the best way to get by post-truth. I realized
that the phrase catastrophe means unhealthy star,
that the planets is likely to be positioned
poorly however good god after we’re shut sufficient
Mars burns pink sizzling in a nook of the western sky.
The e book’s concluding poem, which supplies it’s title, speaks straight again to my meditations firstly of this piece on the miraculous Webb telescope pictures. “Earlier than man dreamed up the flying machine / we owned the air as far above our land // as we might think about,” Van Landingham writes:
As much as infinity. Down
to hell. As a result of air, within the days of tangible
property was nothing. No foot had emerged
from a lander onto the overseas terrain
of the moon. No satellites passing over the hostas.
I’ve little doubt that Van Landingham shares my pleasure concerning the wonders and prospects these Webb telescope pictures counsel. They’re, in a means, a vindication of what she’s preventing when she resists “a rustic divvying up // the sky.” However the poem ends with a robust bellwether within the type of an deal with to a beloved:
[…] So, earlier than the house of utterance
is duly regulated, earlier than the 83 toes of air
we personal above our heads begins its collapse,
this: I like you from the depth of the earth
to the peak of the sky. I like you upon
land immovable, soil open to exploitation
by all. I’m to your unreasonable use alone.
And, when the wingèd gods lastly intrude
together with your possessor’s enjoyment, to an
indefinite extent, I’ll keep in mind a time when
males have been those doing hurt with
their very own palms. I’ll keep in mind the phrases I as soon as
needed to give to you, on the porch, in non-public.
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The dramatic machine deus ex machina (“God from the machine”) concerned reducing onto the stage a deity who would resolve a tragedy’s seemingly insurmountable obstacles and conflicts. All three of those second books of poems resist any such miraculous sidestepping or transcendent decision of circumstance. Rum-drinking gods toying with people from the treetops, a psych ward, a threatening fleet of intrusive drones: any of those would possibly function autos for one-dimensional indifference or anger. As an alternative, Daniels, Honum, and Van Landingham depart room of their poems for thriller, for each love and demise, which “differ — in the event that they do,” as Dickinson concludes, “as Syllable from Sound.”
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Lisa Russ Spaar is a poet, essayist, and professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia. She has published numerous books of poetry, and her latest, Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems, was published in 2021.
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