Scan barcode
chelseakrieg's review
4.0
Cecilia Woloch's collection, Late, examines the grief, frustration, and consuming nature of familial and romantic love. There is a longing and ache here, first introduced in the opening poem, "Aubade": "Oh brilliance of being a beautiful thing in a world full of beautiful things. In which even suffering shimmers and means," and a resignation in "Oh world, hold us up to this light. There is so much to lose that we haven't lost" (15).
Persona poems, like "Hades," fuse myth with experience when Persephone calls to her mother, "Mother, I'll never wake up from him, / I have already traveled too far. / My mouth is the color of his mouth / and his arms are no longer his arms" (17). Already she is negotiating a separation from the mother and a dark and all-consuming love. This is a grief, she seems to suggest, that is hereditary, and she addresses the mother for empathy. This becomes evident in the subsequent poem, "My Mother's Birds," a retelling of the first time the speaker's mother knew grief after her mother's parents killed their daughter's pet chickens for meat (26).
These "ghosts of birds" (18) are not the only ghosts here. Ghosts haunt these pages: familial ghosts (27, 29,31), ghosts of lovers (38, 59), ghost trees (30), and even ghosts of writers past, such as in my favorite poem of the collection, "Nocturne," in which Woloch invokes the poet, H.D.: "When I was that child I believed in trees / as leafy ghosts, and in holy birds; / and I believed in the dark earth turning / at our backs, the wheel of the sky. / I was afraid of this world, even then, / but I loved it, too, as I loved him. / What is the source of such music, H.D.? / Where do we go when we die, when we sleep? / You, who have reached out to me like a branch, / like the pale arm of god, / you must know why we sing" (30).
Birds are both "holy" (30) and devastating for Woloch as she tries to navigate the desire to fly from her grief. There are birds fluttering throughout the collection--at times delicately, at times violently--as she longs for a sky she is unable to access: "Here is a sky that screams back at me as I rush toward it, darkening" (49) and "I shut that black wing from my heart. That bad, bad bird. I slam the light" (55). It is as if she blames the birds for their flight because she is unable to fly. She covets their wings. Of a lover, she offers, "In sleep, he likes to touch the wing bone of my shoulder with his breath" (66) as if the ghost of a wing is asleep in her body.
These poems are not completely without hope, however. The closing and titular poem suggests that there is someone late walking into her life who will lift her away from this sorrow. The poem (and collection) closes with, "And you lifted me over the wall of the garden and carried me back to my life" (70), a closing given power in its suggestion that, through the right love at the right time, even the wingless can know what it is to fly.
Persona poems, like "Hades," fuse myth with experience when Persephone calls to her mother, "Mother, I'll never wake up from him, / I have already traveled too far. / My mouth is the color of his mouth / and his arms are no longer his arms" (17). Already she is negotiating a separation from the mother and a dark and all-consuming love. This is a grief, she seems to suggest, that is hereditary, and she addresses the mother for empathy. This becomes evident in the subsequent poem, "My Mother's Birds," a retelling of the first time the speaker's mother knew grief after her mother's parents killed their daughter's pet chickens for meat (26).
These "ghosts of birds" (18) are not the only ghosts here. Ghosts haunt these pages: familial ghosts (27, 29,31), ghosts of lovers (38, 59), ghost trees (30), and even ghosts of writers past, such as in my favorite poem of the collection, "Nocturne," in which Woloch invokes the poet, H.D.: "When I was that child I believed in trees / as leafy ghosts, and in holy birds; / and I believed in the dark earth turning / at our backs, the wheel of the sky. / I was afraid of this world, even then, / but I loved it, too, as I loved him. / What is the source of such music, H.D.? / Where do we go when we die, when we sleep? / You, who have reached out to me like a branch, / like the pale arm of god, / you must know why we sing" (30).
Birds are both "holy" (30) and devastating for Woloch as she tries to navigate the desire to fly from her grief. There are birds fluttering throughout the collection--at times delicately, at times violently--as she longs for a sky she is unable to access: "Here is a sky that screams back at me as I rush toward it, darkening" (49) and "I shut that black wing from my heart. That bad, bad bird. I slam the light" (55). It is as if she blames the birds for their flight because she is unable to fly. She covets their wings. Of a lover, she offers, "In sleep, he likes to touch the wing bone of my shoulder with his breath" (66) as if the ghost of a wing is asleep in her body.
These poems are not completely without hope, however. The closing and titular poem suggests that there is someone late walking into her life who will lift her away from this sorrow. The poem (and collection) closes with, "And you lifted me over the wall of the garden and carried me back to my life" (70), a closing given power in its suggestion that, through the right love at the right time, even the wingless can know what it is to fly.
More...