Poems and Vignettes
Memory’s Abacus by Anna Lewis (Wiseblood Books, 2024)
The title poem of Anna Lewis’s debut collection waxes and wanes on the page. A grandmother with “swollen knuckles” recites the names of her cousins, some of whom are long dead; and as she speaks, she
taps on the
Christmas tablecloth as if
there lay memory’s abacus.
In its simplicity, this poem is hardly more than a string of names, like beads on a necklace; and yet Lewis beautifully locates the evanescent—whether it be a memory, an experience, a resemblance, or an insight–within the concrete image. In “Childhood Home,” the speaker remembers her Babinka tugging a branch of the dogwood tree
down close to give a look:
the rusty stains at petal’s edge
denoted holy wounds;
the bristling core, a crown of thorns;
the Passion in a bloom.
Like St. Patrick explaining the Holy Trinity with the leaves of a shamrock, Babinka’s perhaps inadvertent tutelage imprints on the child’s mind, where it is interwoven with nostalgia for a house “full of stairs and doors.”
Section II of the collection beautifully explores the triolet, an eight-line poem that achieves its effect using formal repetition. Lines one, four and seven are identical or nearly identical, as are lines two and eight, and the rhyme scheme is tightly limited. But changing context reveals new facets of each repeating line, as if one were turning a diamond to catch the light. Collectively titled “Reveries of a Mother on Foot,” the forty triolets of Memory’s Abacus are in a sense a single poem. A mother pushes her sleeping infant in a stroller, freeing her to think her own thoughts. “Beneath our humid, morning sky, I splice / motherhood and solitude without a trace.” And yet, her reflections are as evanescent as the temporary quiet she has purchased with her walk. “Our journeyings and dreams aren’t ours to keep. /… A puddle glimmers: mirror-fair, sky-deep.”
Her child, of course, is too young to remember these early experiences– “it takes some time to start to build a past” –but as they walk, the mother teaches him the words for things, and he repeats them as best he can. “We sing our song of mirrored syllables. / Each slip of sound invites its twin to play.” Here, the word “twin” refers, not only to the baby’s childish mispronunciation, but to the child’s own “twin“—i.e. the mother herself, when she was a girl. In “[a] hint of me, the girl I used to be,” we see a child who “kept her longings neatly tucked away,” who “snipped her steps, avoiding every crack” even as she looked over her shoulder at the unknown past. Now, as an adult, she is “still finding walking is a way of dreaming, / of wandering into memory’s hidden tracks.”
In one of heredity’s most beautiful gifts, the speaker reflects that her infant resembles her deceased grandfather: “There’s an ache and some solace in seeing / a face within a face, his image peering through.” With this insight, “A daily route grows newer by the day.” The poem proceeds through the mother’s thoughts: about discord and the sufferings of others, about memory and the pilgrimage that remains unfulfilled in this life. Near the end of her walk, as the daylight fades, she sees that “[h]eads bowed, the Lenten roses seem to pray.” When I was a new mother, I often pushed the stroller just like this so I could be alone with my thoughts, and these lines ring gorgeously true. Like the trajectory of an involuntary memory–a moment that we must pause and experience while it lasts–the poems of Anna Lewis’s debut collection gather and elevate, leaving sweetness behind as they ebb.
The O in the Air: Poems by Maryann Corbett (Franciscan University Press, 2023)
While Anna Lewis locates an image of the Passion in a flower, Maryann Corbett takes a further step back, asking, as she longs for roses to bloom again after a long winter, “[w]ho was the first to imagine prayers as blossoms?” Both poets reflect on their childhoods; but where Lewis assumes the persona of a young mother imagining a future for her child, Corbett looks back in maturity, divining the secrets of her elders and tracing their marks on her psyche. And around certain corners–even under our feet–we glimpse the hidden action of God.
The opening poem in Corbett’s collection describes a painting by Brueghel in which a foregrounded landscape contains a far-off scene from scripture embedded like a seed, inviting our gaze beyond visible reality toward the invisible sacred that illuminates it all:
It’s there, if you look past mere vision’s weakness.
The question, always haunted by its answer:
What if the world you learned in flame and darkness
Is apprehended only through these fancies?
What if the whole of it is heavenly?
The collection begins with speakers who struggle with puzzling questions from childhood. A truth might remain hidden because we were too young at the time to interpret what we have seen; but when we are older, the principal actors in the original drama often cannot explain. Thus, we are left with the overwriting of memory, sifting its choices and lapses. In Sorrowful Mysteries, the speaker is suddenly reminded of the frantic nighttime arrival of one of her parents’ friends: “[t]hrough a glass of years, darkly,” the scene from her childhood “gathers shape, then fades.” Clearly, someone has been driving drunk; perhaps the police have been called; there is a hint of impropriety— “She’s got a hell of a nerve, / writing us here” –but as to the substance of it, we do not know. “This is childhood’s essence,” Corbett says, “always to grope in the dark.” And
What the grip finds, it hoards
to worry in its fingers.
To tell, like rosary beads.
Here, the act of telling is synonymous with praying; you might say that the stories we make from our experiences are sanctified when we offer them to God.
In “Knowledge,” a daughter discovers her elderly mother’s previous marriage, which ended in divorce after her first husband virtually abandoned her during the war. The mother’s subsequent remarriage kept her from receiving communion until an annulment late in her life restored her to the Eucharist. In the midst of the daughter’s anger at the man who abandoned her mother—an act that distorted her childhood–the poet resolves to keep this family secret. After all, due to her mother’s cognitive decline, “[m]ine is the only memory / she has.”
Other truths of the past seem to lose their freshness, their appositeness, in modern-day contexts. In “Lavoro all’uncinetto,” an Italian grandmother’s precious lacework deteriorates over time into a mere means of financial support:
And holiness, subject to dust and ashes
(house dust, ash from my father’s cigarettes,
Impatient handling, children’s grubby hands)
Broke down.
…
What happens now? Who values patterned beauty?
Form on repeat, like rosaries or song?
Young children frequently appear in this collection, including one who joyfully sings out the word “cake!” during mass as the host is elevated: “Not quite the party I wanted,” the speaker says, “but it serves.” The “holy, wounded memory” that haunts the Eucharistic feast might be a personal one–or it might be the Passion, symbolized by the crucifix hanging over the altar.
In “Ardors,” Corbett turns toward the dying of the year, when nature surrenders itself to God in perfect trust that spring will come. The trees, however, seem to share our fallen state:
As if the sin of Adam took its toll
on trees, the maples stricken with the fall
burn in their sins. Red passion and proud gold,
their vanities float down like scraps of flame.
The days of burning leaf piles are over; “[n]ow the tumulus of compost / seethes” as the earth inevitably winds down, however slowly:
All our burning’s doomed,
even these fires where maple trees are found
still ardent after years, still unconsumed.
Other poems take a more whimsical tone. “To the Unknown God” declares an internet router to be the “newest of idols.” Meanwhile, the water-heater, “pure as a temple column, / went marble-cold to the landfill.” And yet we are
hauling new deities in
to a pantheon of deadbeats,
while we glance over our shoulders
at the town gates. Oh, they rattle!
The final poem of this middle section is “Hoarder”: “To get past stuff, it seems you have to die.” This line points us neatly toward the last part of the collection, which is full of endings. An older couple buys a burial plot; long-time neighborhood residents watch transitory students cast their belongings to the curb at the end of the semester; a popular drive-in is closed. In “Monuments”, Polish and German war dead achieve detente in a cemetery:
The snows of every winter white them out,
and with the summers, over all this absence
the great blade of the mower passes, sighing.
I saw myself in the poem “Praying Sleepless;” I am often beset by distraction (“What does adoring / feel like? Like fingers itching for a cell phone?”), and I sometimes pray best when I wake in the middle of the night. The speaker of the poem learns to rely on memorized vocal prayer, where she can
fall, into the surf of repetition,
hail Mary, holy Mary; hidden behind
the wave machine of mantra, aiming at You
but slantwise, down the curl.
And like the speaker of “A Dream of Rooms,” I frequently dream of shapeshifting interiors that seem to grow bigger and more cluttered as I attempt to move through them. But here, the opposite dynamic is at play. The place of “stairs and doors” Anna Lewis evokes in “Childhood Home” is swept clean and bare in Corbett’s poem of loss:
The house, he knows, is theirs.
Doors open into rooms he’s never seen.
These rooms are empty and polished; they have somehow been “stripped of pointless things. … Their early indiscretions in deep pinks / and greens have been absolved.” And when the bereaved speaker awakes, he finds himself alone.
There are many more gorgeous poems I could have highlighted here. This is a collection to savor again and again.
Becoming Human: A Collection of Vignettes on Grief, Connection, and Longing by Natalie Kathryn Sanchez (2023)
There is something heartbreakingly close to the surface about the writing of a young person–someone who has not yet ceased to notice things, to generously give herself over to the visceral experience of nature or to a surge of emotion. Natalie Sanchez, the oldest of four children, suffered the sudden loss of her father when she was a senior in high school. This is her second book about grief.
Between the two books, as she says in her introduction, “I needed to leave space for the paradox: Grief is greater than me, intertwined with emotions beyond our language, and I am so much more than my grief. … This book is … an invitation to come back to ourselves time and time again.”
Sanchez does this by entering fully into the experience of grief as it arises in everyday life. Some of the reflections are essentially poems:
I have a recurring dream that you faked your death,
another where you are an absent father,
as if you chose to leave me.
And while she always longs for him– “[o]ur car conversations gave me an early recognition of experiencing time instead of counting it” –she tries to absorb herself in music or in a challenging bike ride that unlocks her euphoria. These lyrical prose essays are full of crisp images that have the savor of poetry. In “My Little Brother,” Sanchez longs to shield a child who must endure yet another funeral while “[t]he earth tosses and turns on its axis like an irritable insomniac, indecisive clouds parting and rejoining while we wait.” In “Sprinklers,” Sanchez remembers how, as a child, “fireflies lit curiosity between your palms.” “Dinner Table Fears” serves as a dispatch of sorts from the cusp of young womanhood to one’s future self, as a group of old high school friends gather to drink honey shrub cocktails, each of them “scared to disappoint another version of ourselves.”
But many of the pieces show us a young woman successfully navigating the world through her pain and helping others to do it. In “Choices,” Sanchez brilliantly nails the opening line: “[b]etween our first round of waters and the check, my brother chooses a college.” And in “My View from the Bleachers,” she suffers with a younger brother who is stuck on the sidelines even as she witnesses his growing resilience: “[f]rom the bleachers, I see a man emerging through his sprouting shoulders.” As she grasps after her fading memories of her father’s outline, she recognizes that she has taken on “[t]he shape of your absence, a soft semblance of what you left behind.”
Paul Sanchez passed away on March 9, 2018. How proud he must be of his Natalie now.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 