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mary_soon_lee's review
4.0
Ellen McGrath Smith's first poetry collection ranges over drinking, alcoholism, growing up, men, women, baseball, yoga. There are poems that speak about loneliness, about love, about yearning for a father's love. The poems read easily, but only because the poet has mastered her craft. Their content is usually serious and often dark. From the poem titled "A Local Joan of Arc":
The excellent opening piece ("The Locust: A Foundational Narrative") is the longest, and ranges flexibly from conventional poetry to prose poetry, encompassing locusts in three forms (tree, insect, and yoga pose), always rooted in the narrator's experience. Many of the sections deal with the narrator's father, who once pitched semi-pro baseball, and I found them very powerful:
Other favorites of mine in the collection include "The Annunciation," "February Was Only Half Over," and "Corona: The Apples in Winter."
Importantly for me, these poems have character, and, often, narrative. I liked them very much, and, reading them, felt I would like the poet too.
She's never known man; if she has, she's
stood off from their pumping
and dogged but brief
ruminations.
For there is a king that she needs
to restore. Some have called him her father,
but that is impossible; that man's in jail.
But the man who put the needle in her arm
that first night, he spoke of his plan
for a peaceable kingdom.
The excellent opening piece ("The Locust: A Foundational Narrative") is the longest, and ranges flexibly from conventional poetry to prose poetry, encompassing locusts in three forms (tree, insect, and yoga pose), always rooted in the narrator's experience. Many of the sections deal with the narrator's father, who once pitched semi-pro baseball, and I found them very powerful:
She'll tell me he might have gone on to the pros. That it stopped somewhere. He's dead, so I can't ask him to show me the chalk lines, the choices, the place where he dropped the ball.... He never came to my softball games, though I did pitch. I had a spinner, and I took the act of pitching very seriously. When I was on the mound, there was a force-field around me of atoms charged with both my hope and my failure.
A good arm. I'd have liked him to tell me I had one.
Other favorites of mine in the collection include "The Annunciation," "February Was Only Half Over," and "Corona: The Apples in Winter."
Importantly for me, these poems have character, and, often, narrative. I liked them very much, and, reading them, felt I would like the poet too.
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