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  • Given Time
  • Alan Walowitz (bio)
To One Who Bends My Time
Sarah White
Deerbrook Editions
www.deerbrookeditions.com/to-one-who-bends-my-time
98 Pages; Print, $17.50

Who wouldn't want to bend time to human will, or to bend it, at least a bit, in hopes of making it last? Or perhaps bend it to replay painful moments upon request, and in doing so, better integrate them into now. Many have tried such time-bending through meditation, yoga, and recently mindfulness, as well as less reliable means like teleportation, time-travel, and astral projection. Others have attempted to explain exactly what such bends in time might truly mean. Science doesn't make it easy. Einstein uses the term "space-time" in order to help stem any confusion between time, as understood by poets and other earthlings, and time as astrophysicists might understand it. Here on earth, Arthur Miller attempted a time-bend, himself, calling his autobiography Timebends (1972). This, according to Roger Shattuck's book review of it, ("He Who Is Most Alone" in The New York Times on November 8, 1987) probably for the way the great American playwright dipped back and forth between past and present. Coincidentally, there is an Arthur Miller reference in one of Sarah White's poems—to A View from the Bridge (1955)—in her "Ideas of Honor." Here she melds the fates of Madam Butterfly, Eddie Carbone, and, in her imagination, the speaker's own sorry, romantic fate at the hands of a Sicilian lover. That's only one kind of time-bending here in to one who bends my time by this poet, visual artist, and teacher. And, while it's true that this Miller reference might be coincidental, a close reading of any poem by Sarah White—either in this collection or in her previous ones—would lead one to believe there isn't much room for accidents, poetic, linguistic, or otherwise.

Perhaps it's best to begin a closer look by dispensing with the fiction that to one who bends my time, Sarah White's latest, is not autobiographical. She provides plenty of details in the poems that indicate these are largely poems wrung from her soul and from her own experience. In fact, the collection walks the very fine line between honesty, which even sometimes takes the form of self-laceration, and self-healing, which then happily becomes, as ought to happen in good poetry, self-healing for both the poet and the reader. An example of such self-laceration is "Words On a Wintry Day," a section from the triptych "Three Spilled Milk Poems."

She has never used the phrase mental anguish.Now, on this February morning in Ann Arbor,coached by a lawyer, she uttersthe term before a judgewho declares her marriage over.

Later, the Anguish-Makercomes to see her, thanks herfor completing the procedure,informs her of his own near future—a woman whose name is familiar

and a wedding on the last day of February.Leap Day! time for magic spells.When she hears his kind parting words—I hopeyou find someone, Sarah—she knowsshe'll be alone for years and years.

It's difficult to tell such stories on oneself, the humiliation of a divorce, a poet "forced" to utter words lent by a lawyer, a confrontation with the Anguish-Maker, even as he's about to deliver more anguish—and then some more. And it should be noted, "Spilled Milk" is the title of the opening section of the book from which this poem comes. It's filled with stories from childhood, legends, old wives' tales, and aphorisms. But it's not all sorrow and there's no self-pity in it, even for the occasional self-laceration. For instance, the potentially painful poem titled "If at My Deathbed," turns out to be a hoot, not at all the promised deathwatch, but rather a gently sardonic poem about a teacher who taught her class to sing the Norwegian national anthem. The poet seems to want us to know that such knowledge might end up being every bit as...

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