Two recent American women poets, Rebecca Foust and Bobbi Lurie, have written collections of poetry that showcase some of the best writing to be found in the current poetic scene. Though they are not well-known poets, they are worth reading for their ability to write fluently about life’s sweeping and subtle moments.
Poetry of Nature and Family
Ruined and abandoned landscapes and rural places litter Rebecca Foust’s lyrically-written chapbook Mom’s Canoe . In these poems walk lonely, disturbed, lost people – and also those transformed by small beauties. The canoe of the title - which figures in two of the poems – is the basis of a shocking simile in “Backwoods”:
“. . . your beloved canoe still lies on its side
split like your lip
where he kicked it,
the night you ran home to us
in your nightgown and only one shoe.”
Foust’s poems alternate between first and second person, revealing places from childhood – a mine, a quarry, a carnival – that live on in one’s memory. Tragic events objectively described coexist with seemingly simple images made tragic, such as when the speaker’s mother cries at the news of an unwanted pregnancy and “tears dripping and bloomed / on the gray wool of her dress.”
Visual Imagery
The use of a startling verb alters the flow of some poems. In “Allegheny Mountain Bowl,” the “mountains calve memory from twilight” and the perspective on those mountains is sharpened. The loss of innocence - the awakening to mortality - becomes an image of “Mayflies” who “splurged their thirty days in “The Quarry.”
These poems manage to be starkly visual and also dreamlike, as so many of them go back in time and present events through a type of filter or piece of scratched isinglass. They are sepia-tone photographs without being nostalgic, and that’s a difficult thing to achieve.
In “The Dream,” about the speaker’s father and his acquisition and loss of dreams and visions throughout his life, until in old age, he “learned / again how to long just for anything not broken.” Therein lies this slim book’s appeal – in its consistent search for the unbroken strain in lives, in life ever bent on ruin.
Self-Reflective Poetry
Letter from the Lawn, a collection of poems by Bobbi Lurie, displays a wide range in styles and subject matter: From the prose poem “Linoleum” (what a great title/subject) to the imagist “Love Song’ to the lyric “The Radical Poet Grows Increasingly Famous at Sunset,” (another great title) Lurie reveals the ironies, decisions, and perceptions that are the stuff of everyday lives, of shared humanity.
“Radical Poet” ends with these lines: “The worst thing about living alone / Is the leftover potatoes on the stove.” The rest of the poem appears to be images from a failed poetry reading, and these lines sum up the loss implicit in the occasion, while directing the reader’s attention to what truly matters: not notoriety or fame but the leftovers in one’s kitchen.
“Jenine at 36” has a similar feeling of loss and empty domesticity, as Jenine lets in Bible salesmen because she no longer has friends, and in the “vacancy of the room” after they leave, she “pressed her hands together like two fish.”
Separation and Loneliness
The collection’s title poem is short and written from the poet to the lawn and reveals more loneliness amongst the mowers, edgers / wedging the patches of grass into segments” so that the speaker only recognizes, “The separateness is so intense.” Even the word “lawn” as a symbol in the title and in the collection has the sound of loss, the sound of something remote and vacant.
Even with this rather mournful atmosphere, there are poems of celebration and happiness, and this is a collection very worth reading. The poems are short, moving, and often profound, and they are almost always readable and should be accessible to an audience that may or may not be full of readers of poetry.
For both enthusiastic readers of poetry and those who rarely give it a chance, Foust and Lurie have much to offer in their poetry of life’s complex questionings and simple pleasures.
References:
Foust, Rebecca. Mom’s Canoe. Texas Review Press, 2008.
Lurie, Bobbi. Letter from the Lawn. Word Tech Communications, 2006.
Shaun Perkins - Shaun Perkins, teacher, poet, storyteller, porch-sitter, beekeeper, gardener, writer, has been a high school and university teacher for ...
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