In our time of unravelment—when the digital world threatens to undo everything else—Penelope Shuttle can gather the scattered strands of our lives in poems that are at once conversational and utterly, unpredictably poetic. That is, their formal beauty and emotional charge go hand in hand. In this age of soundbite jargon, metaphor still comes as naturally to Shuttle as English does.
You might say that Carol Rumens has paid the ultimate compliment to Paul Celan's poetry: talking back to it in a voice that echoes the Romanian poet's own fractured but very nimble idiom. In 12 poems she calls “notelets”—intended to be read as letters to the poet, who died in 1970—she responds to some of the poet's main themes and to the events from which his poems emerged.
When poets look to the stars, often they are hoping to place their human worries in a wider context, in search of consolation. But what if they find, instead, that their concerns are reflected somehow in the sky overhead? Think of the famous fragment from Sappho: alone and unhappy, she watches the moon and the Pleiades descend together, like lovers lying down in bed.
Jude Nutter’s “Disco Jesus and the Wavering Virgins in Berlin, 2011” is a poem I wanted to read again as soon as I reached the last line. I wanted to see how a poem with such a mundane beginning – the speaker sits in the dark, on a rainy night in Berlin, watching TV evangelists – could accumulate so much imaginative force over the next seven pages.
Bertha Rogers’s new collection, Wild, Again, gathers more than five dozen widely published poems that were written before humanity’s current crisis but now seem deeply relevant to our new way of living. They are daringly and fervently engaged with the natural world – through observation and through active and imaginative participation.
“The Silence” [is] a loving and inventive meditation on the sources of creative inspiration; the vagaries of artistic confidence; and the ability of the mind to keep observing, associating and struggling to build connections, even when those connections unravel, again and again.
