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Feasting on Air
Eva Miodownik Oppenheim
Moon Pie Press
www.moonpiepress.com
Pages; Print, $15.00

Feasting on Air, Eva Miodownik Oppenheim’s third book of poems published by Moon Pie Press, follows Things as They Are (2005) and Through the Loop of Time (2010). A graduate of Queens College in New York, she completed further studies at Columbia University and in England. Over the years, Oppenheim held positions as an editor, publicity writer, administrator, and co-teacher of a poetry workshop affiliated with Barnard College. She died in 2014, and this, her posthumously published collection, seems to be very much a summing up of her life and experiences.

In Feasting on Air, the first poem, “CT Scan,” immediately draws us into the said feast as “A giant negative lights up the unblemished white wall,” and the speaker is “pretending to observe dispassionately…the infinitesimal aberrations” [on the] “lunar landscape of [her] lungs.”

The title poem of the book itself is an ode subtitled “To Oxygen,” in which the author says, “I used to breathe you freely…Now I carry you on my back…rationed benevolence…delicately served / pulsing in metered liters / at the push of a button….” This tender poem, however, is one in which a combination of unusual spacing and a lack of punctuation, as in the following lines, interfered with my enjoyment:

…wandering under Adirondack pines   or along hot sands of Georgica Beach great swallows of you gorgeous summer air  running in the wind inhaling lungfuls….

Since we are told that the narrator is wandering, is it then the gorgeous summer air that’s running in the wind inhaling lungfuls? In my estimation, a more straightforward presentation with a well-placed comma or two would have been most helpful and not at all detrimental to the modernity of the presentation. Almost as if the poet presaged my reaction, for no apparent reason, the second stanza reverts to a more straightforward style.

Happily, most of the poems are not burdened with issues of format or syntax. That said, indenting works quite nicely in some instances, especially to indicate a change of scene or mood instead of using a full stanza break, and, in many instances, only the least amount of punctuation is needed to make sense of the lines.

Somewhat aside from the premise, “Dawn” is a string of three haiku nicely done. I particularly like the third:

Dawn on slow river invisible phantom boats moan through rising fog.

These miniatures lead into a small group of meditative poems: a father and his two sons building a tree house “in complete silent concentration,” a contemplation of Zen poetry, a description of a tabletop garden where “…stillness in motion / is silence in sound,” and closing, in “What the Monk Teaches,” with these lines: “When it is dark / sit alone / listen / to your breath / embrace pain / like a mother embraces a wailing child.”

These thoughts, which culminate in “The Solitary Walker” and “Waiting for the Hurricane” at the end of Part I, give us a glimpse of the author’s acknowledgment of what’s to come with age.

Part II could have been called “Words for Better or Worse.” The lead poem, simply titled “Words,” presents an interesting contrast between a young boy’s limited vocabulary and “The aging poet felled by a stroke / [who] dreams words / she cannot utter.” “Meditation” suggests “time to evade words…” “Time to dismantle thoughts….” In “Talk,” “When language loses its way / what is said hardly matters.” And so it goes. Even in “In the Circus,” a prose poem, “…disembodied voices wail in a foreign language…” and “Gallery,” an ekphrastic one, ends with “How little of one another we can ever know.”

I couldn’t tell if “Maria Delfina Remembers” is ekphrastic or just fictional, but I found it to be one of the most satisfying poems in the collection. It’s a small gem, in which the language appears, at first, to be fairly prosaic, but the imagery is thoroughly poetic:

The bells of Vallarta clatter like hooves on cobblestone. Coconut palms signal the dawn and all the fishing boats have gone.

Eva Oppenheim came to New York...

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