Miscellany of Chapbooks

Page 15 March–April 2009 Miscellany of Chapbooks Haines Eason Louise Glück’s October is an extended, meditative poem in six parts. It opens facing the firm winter—the heavy hush coming on—after harvest. Yet for Glück, in this poem, October is not only a door into dark, it is also a “balm after [the] violence” of the summer—a pause allowing reflection. But she takes us further, forcing us to consider our specific era: in our changing times, fall is less and less the bringer of respite. Sometimes we witness “the August sun, returning”; is this evidence of our hand in the world, or merely another Indian Summer? From part 2: Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer; bounty, balm after violence. Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields have been harvested and turned. Tell me this is the future, I won’t believe you. Tell me I’m living, I won’t believe you. October is dynamic in that it echoes its namesake —asks us to live in a static and classic notion of the season—and alters our preconceptions of the harvest month. Is the sun Glück describes a balm; has it cooled to usefulness in the waning season? Or, does its heat yet come on, hard as summer’s, and so out of place in the late year? In October, Glück rides the year to its nadir; sometimes she sights spring in the distance—“Come to me, said the world. I was standing / in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal”—sometimes she doubts nature will stay its course: The brightness of the day becomes the brightness of the night; the fire becomes the mirror. My friend the earth is bitter; I think sunlight has failed her. Bitter or weary, it is hard to say. Between herself and the sun, something has ended. In this chapbook, Louise Glück wanders the classic path of season-meditation, musing on the portal month between fullness and dearth. But she is smarter than to adhere to expectation. Here she notes—and directs our sight to—the sinister character to the light which was not there seasons before. October’s subtlety will certainly cause some to assume it is a light text. It is not—it is essential for our time. Robert Ostrom’s To Show the Living is a linked elegy in questions, queries, and prompts. These inquiries, which take the place of standard titles, are drawn from an anthropological field guide. The elegy is for a deceased and beloved family figure, a sort of matriarch. The book opens somberly. In the beginning poem, “Provide a picture of your habitat,” the speaker, seeking a space to grieve, “amble[s] in pennyroyal ,” but is soon confronted by the industrial fact of the land, which produces “Floodlit /And combustible agriculture.” In the same opening poem a plague awaits release: “One / Can hear scratching of locusts in their eggs / At the edge of the lake.” It’s braver poets who put their bits of leftover wonder to work. It is passé to denounce the pastoral simply because the land is under duress.And while Ostrom’s To Show the Living does begin in denunciation, it widens while retreating in time to unveil a purer place where the speaker, returned to youth, is reunited with the deceased. And, though the poems reinhabit a homeplace both temporally and geographically removed—zooming backward in time, away from the polluted present—the evoked landscape invigorates the present by pushing notions of the corrupt to the fringes of the reader’s mind. From “Tell what happens to widows”: Before we were whales and far in green, she was taller here, walking the flat with me at low tide. Letting go my hand, she’d stoop and drive hers into the sand and, pulling out a razor, she’d rinse it and say, “dear, here.” Sandy, I’d suck them out of those long shells she held to my lips. Her hair was bay leaves and kale, much yearned for. Skin, silver then gone not to harvest bogs or rake quahogs in deep, but such a...