North Carolina Miscellany
The pyramids appear again in “Smoldering,” from Heartwood: “Morning, and the street rumbles through a day / like any other. Earth is peopling again / and we unfold, thirsty as lotus seeds / lifted from a tomb.” Suk’s simile reminds us that everything is constantly being discovered, remembered and reborn, that everything comes from the tomb, from the death of other life and other things. As with her earlier works, the poems in Lie Down with Me demonstrate Suk’s gifts for compression and wordplay. One of the best among the new works is “Gone,” which opens with deer as instruments of destruction, devouring the tender flowers of youth and spring before becoming the next stanza’s victims when they are struck by cars: “Doe, fawn, stag – the many who drift by / and on, deserting us for the baleful / underground mission of worms.” These lines highlight Suk’s love for a good pun: the worms both have a baleful mission (to devour) and live underground in a baleful mission, as in church. The poem takes a rather odd turn at the end: “Even the bees, gone, taking with them aromas / that drive the senses into rut – //
the earthy, the salty, the gamey / odor I love of a man.” Even in the era of Colony Collapse Disorder, how do bees take with them all the scents of men? Still, “gamey” connects the men to the predators/prey that are the deer, and connects man and deer and death and sex to earth, our baleful mission. Another example is “Sweet Time,” in which the sweetness that opens the poem, “If the day starts sweet / cloyingly sweet,” is from a dead mouse decomposing behind the wall. This unexpected correlative for sweetness barely has time to make readers blink before the pun on “death takes its own sweet time” requires a second blink, of a different variety. The newest pieces in Lie Down with Me are also notable for their strong endings. “Sweet Time,” for instance, inquires, and if the day is not one you want remembered – that drag, your shadow, continuing to haunt like an amputated limb – isn’t it better than tomorrow suddenly bereft of you?
One hopes that it is. If a poem occasionally gives way to a brief surge of abstraction – in the
NCLR congratulates Alan Michael Parker on his 2012 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award for Long Division (Tupelo Press). This is Parker’s seventh poetry collection. Ruth Moose noted in remarks for the award ceremony, “One of the major tasks of a poet is to make the language new. Alan Michael Parker spins new language like a neon top on the tip of his little finger. In poem after poem he twirls fresh language like a lasso.” n
right Alan Michael Parker at the North Carolina book award ceremony during the annual
meeting of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, Asheville, 16 Nov. 2012
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initial poem, “What We Know Is Not What We Feel,” the speaker finds no direction or path to follow, “nothing / of anger sorrow love / or the foolish wishes / we wept and fought for” – the poem always returns not only to the concrete, but to surprise and even charm. Here, for instance, despite the lack of direction, the poet is left “like the aura of a burned-out star,” but with “the body / that incorrigible flirt, / still leading me on.” The ending of the collection’s opening poem, one of the new poems of this compilation volume, could be a coda for Lie Down with Me: for all their preoccupation with mortality, brevity, the need to take even rotten-mouse sweetness wherever we can find it, the new poems, coming out of the long history they illuminate, are also “incorrigible flirts,” leading the reader on. Their humor and joy balance their fear and despair with exactitude and grace. Their punning is entirely Suk-like, a redolent bazaar encompassing both that which leads us with the knowledge that it must let us fall (like love, perhaps, or like the world at large) and that which leads us onward, building out of star-rubble a path we can follow a little longer, a few more steps. n
Photograph by Nick Lanier; courtesy of NC Department of Cultural Resources
2012 Roanoke-Chowan Poetry AWARD
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