“Any body can die, evidently.” So begins Robert Pinsky’s brief, deft, moving abecedarian poem, “ABC.” The casual tone of that opening statement manifests one kind of resistance to the requirements of the form, as to the requirements of mortality. Yes, we die — do you want to make something of it?
Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,
Knowledge, love. Many
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.
The agility of the imagination dancing its way through the tight space of the rest of the poem, even as it acknowledges dark prospects, offers another kind of resistance. What can we make of the time we have? How can we shape our own life sentences? Paradoxically, by engaging the abecedarian’s restrictions — even doubling down on them — Pinsky can offer us, by the end of the poem, a surprising feeling of release:
Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:
X = your zenith.
No longer a countdown, but “Sweet time unafflicted.” Not a set path, but the “Various world.” And not the X that crosses you out, but one that marks the high point of a life.
Carrie Etter’s new book of poems — her fifth — Grief’s Alphabet (Seren Books, 2024), is animated by a spirit not unlike the one at work in Pinsky’s “ABC.” Grief may give Etter her alphabet — grief in particular over her mother’s death — but with formal virtuosity that seems almost effortless and improvisatory, Etter makes out of that alphabet a book of deeply moving poems. We learn our ABC’s, and then we learn their limits: what they cannot spell out for us, how the vital disorder of our lives cannot be predicted or contained by that neat sequence. Eventually, ABC’s become a scaffolding against which we measure our attempts to come to terms with things we have no terms for, orders that undo themselves, and endings that never end. In “Notes for A,” for example, Etter’s abecedarian keeps breaking off never getting past A:
Alchemy: how to translate agony into
An ague had her
It advanced quickly, a week between
Arlington Drive, 1974 to 2011, a quarter-acre corner lot overrun with
crabgrass and dandelions come summer …
The poet may be frustrated by the inability to “translate agony,” but the poem is alive with the variety of the paths she attempts. Another thwarted abecedarian begins — and remains — mired in the middle. In “H is for Hurtle, J for July,” the unbearable proximity of the mother’s death date, July 29th, followed by her birthday, July 30th, trap the poet. She can’t move forward, though she wants to hurtle through July:
I said
hurtle yet could also say hurdle
as I spent the month leaping and
stumbling at the insurmountable.
Indeed, it is difficult for her to get past herself:
I loiter in bed, but I, bride to wakefulness, I,
mind rummaging toward world, I,
horizontal lumbering toward
vertical, I, athirst, swallowing
to wet my throat, I —
The ordering principle of the alphabet, like the calendar, heightens the disordering power of her grief. The “I” keeps winding up alone at the brink of the line-break.
One of the predicaments Grief’s Alphabet explores throughout is the challenge to that isolated “I”, seeking to place itself in relation to the lost family, to the death of the father and then of the mother. The family’s constellation is charted over the course of the book’s three sections, “Origin Story,” “The Brink,” and “Orphan Age,” From the very first poem, “Birthday as Adoption Day,” the speaking “I” is nested in family, and in the first-person plural: “A nurse settled me in your arms, and I — With we I began.”
Alphabet’s second poem, “An Adoption in 360°,” expands that dyad to the triad of mother and father carrying their child, asserting, “the three are one.” In the rest of “Origin Story,” family patterns ripple out from that nucleus — parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, sisters — linked by the love and hardship that they share.
The first real threat to the family is registered in “The House of Two Weathers, or The Years after the Layoff,” an ominous (though luminous) poem delineating the challenges brought by the loss of the father’s job. More sinister and pervasive than the economic threat, is the suggestion that the family’s shared experience is unravelling. Couplets that could suggest togetherness increasingly emphasize divergence:
The House of Two Weathers, or The Years after the Layoff
The mailman brought a Florida postcard
or a thin white envelope the weight of an anvil.
The potted African violet in the kitchen window
raised its richest purple or drooped.
The mother bustled over the stove
or at the sink stood, staring out.
The tabby lazed on the couch
or crouched under a bed.
Almost cloudless blue or
hailstones the size of golf balls.
Cursing, he pored over the bills,
or he cycled into the prairie.
In laughter or in silence the girls
husked cobs of corn over the bin.
The lasagna tasted of love,
or it tasted of ash.
The moon the moon the moon.
Etter returns to this couplet form in “The Last,” a poem about flying home (hurtling home, one might say, encountering hurdles) from England to her ailing father, arriving at the threshold of the house:
There I hesitated, not sitting but standing, teetering
on the thinnest of fences,
afraid not of my ebbing father but beginning
the end, the last
room the last hours the last song the last
of us, us …
Yes, the poet prepares to mourn her father, but it is even harder to face the challenge to “us.”
Etter’s previous volume, The Weather in Normal (Seren Books, 2018), also explored the shift in the family’s emotional weather, and her father’s fate, placing it in the context of climate change. That impressive volume was punctuated by tornadoes, blizzards, floods, and chaotic form. Grief’s Alphabet, however, is even more ambitious, varied, accomplished and moving than its predecessor.
“The Last Photograph,” the poem that marks the end of the books first section, “Origin Story,” showcases Etter’s strengths — depth and subtlety of feeling, understated and expert use of form. On the page opposite the poem, the poet’s mother looks out at us from the photograph that is its itself the subject of the poem. There are other family photographs in the book, opening all three sections, and yet three more at the end of the book, but this is the only poem that is ekphrastic, directly engaging its accompanying image. The relationship between poem and photograph is not static, however, but dynamic. The photograph does not simply “illustrate” the poem, nor does the poem merely “describe” the photograph. The poet narrates and then revisits and re-reads the occasion that produced the photo, when the daughter joined her newly widowed mother. It begins with them “Together,” but also marks and dwells on what separates them:
The Last Photograph
a golden shovel on the opening line of Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘To Prisoners’
Together we watched TV, or you gazed idly while I
eyed you, widowing. I reached for my phone to call
you back.
‘Smile,’ I said, positioning the camera for
the last time. You turned slowly; you
struggled to smile, the lamplight a halo, cultivation
of a minor saint.
I took the photo, ignorant of
the effort. Only after your death did I sense the strength
summoned to lift your face, now evident in
the mirror. Blame this photo on the love or the
selfishness of daughters, before they meet the dark.
Although mother and daughter seemed to be watching TV together, a deceptively casual “or” signals that their looks diverge. The daughter watches her mother not-watching TV, distracted, her thoughts elsewhere, a symptom of her “widowing.” To remedy that distance, the daughter calls her back, with an invitation to smile for the camera. The poem turns slowly, as the mother turns slowly toward her daughter, and we dwell on that turn, considering “the lamplight a halo,” in the photograph that looks at the reader as it first looked at the daughter. The poem turns again as the poet confesses now what she wasn’t aware of at the time: “I took the photo, ignorant of / the effort” she recognizes only after her mother’s death. The deepening understanding the poem explores can be tracked through its expert enjambments. It is only after the line-break, for example, that we learn that the daughter her positions “the camera for / the last time” (although the title warned us as much). “I took the photo,” she tells us, “ignorant of / the effort.” There is so much, the poem suggests, one might be ignorant of. After her mother’s death, the daughter can at last recognize the “strength” summoned by her mother to comply with the request to smile, because it is the strength she herself must summon to confront her own grief at the loss of her mother. We turn back to the photograph for new evidence of this strength, but discover (again, after a subtly dislocating enjambment) it is “now evident in / the mirror.” The daughter looks at herself, reading her own loss. And yet, it is impossible to say whether she is conjuring an actual mirror or speaking instead of the way the face in the photograph gives her back an effort she recognizes as her own. “Blame this photo,” the poet offers, “on the love or the / selfishness of daughters, before they meet in the dark,” an imperative directed at her mother, herself, and her reader, carrying both indictment and apology. Neither she nor her mother are looking into the light, instead they are meeting in “the dark” of their separate but congruent losses.
Reading such a graceful, understated poem in this way, with such close attention to the emotional work performed by enjambments, risks weighing it down. And yet, I hope to heighten awareness of the degree of skill required here, when the end words have been dictated by the chosen form of the golden shovel, based on the first line of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, ‘To Prisoners.’ A golden shovel is like the opposite of an abecedarian: the ends of the lines, rather than their beginnings, are predetermined. Here: “I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.” It is as if, with these words, Brooks herself offers encouragement to the poet and her mother and the reader, to anyone who might be (metaphorically) a prisoner of grief. I re-read “The Last Photograph” several times before it occurred to me to search for Brooks’ “To Prisoners.” It wasn’t in my print collections, but I found it on-line, first at the Academy of American Poets website, and then more tellingly on a digitized website for the journal The Illinois Issues Humanities Essays where it was first published in 1981: https://www.lib.niu.edu/1981/ii810719.html. It is accompanied there by a photo-essay on Illinois prisons by Greg Mansfield. Etter’s own pairing of poem and photograph may have been inspired by this pairing, in which the relationship between text and image is similarly dynamic.
Near the end of the book, a prose poem, of intense clarity, “Instructions for the Glimpse,” finds the daughter, like her mother before her, distractedly looking-not-looking at the scene in front of her. The reader doesn’t need a photograph to be able to share the glimpse.
Stare out the window, past the geranium and dormant orchid, when
washing knives.
There: the jolt of injury, a bead of blood, a shudder back into the body and its
unspoken hungers.
Part memory, part presence, the sharp perception of the one who was. In
this kitchen. In this now tenderly suspending time.
Soon you will either drift into memory – her care of cooing, bandage,
attention — or into life, turning on the tap to rinse the wound …
What is “There”? What is here? A lyric poem is a peculiarly apt vehicle for “tenderly suspending time,” which seldom proceeds linearly like a clock or calendar or alphabet, but instead stops and starts and circles back around on itself. Perhaps the alphabet of our human lives ends on an O (“Ouroboros” is one of the poems in the book’s last section). That O would be not unlike the “Oh!” in Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Surprised by Joy,” which begins
Surprised by Joy — impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport — Oh! With whom
But thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Etter’s version of a Wordsworthian moment like this one is captured in the brief, penultimate poem, “Ghost,” which offers different kind of glimpse. It responds to a photograph we cannot see and gestures towards words yet to come, ending with the O of an open mouth, of endless beginnings:
Ghost
I stand just outside the house, on the north hill of Bath, and look down into
the valley. I nod at Solsbury Hill and Bathampton, as though in greeting.
The photo captures the moment I raise my arm to point them out, to
her standing beside me, to her who never stood here, who never came to
England. My mouth is open: there are so many words.
The poem refuses to be explicit; it mentions neither grief nor joy. And yet it offers a scene of tenderly suspended time in which both are present.
[Published by Seren Books on May 13, 2024, 72 pages, $14.99 paperback]