Poetry is a place into which we can disappear from pain. In these collections, there are many other themes explored, but these passages intertwined like threads through my reading.
In “A Toothless Crackhead Was the Mascot” from Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015):
“This begins the concept of tragedy:
infinity the image of smoke running
from a soda can split & crumpled into a makeshift pipe.”
In Rainy River First Nations (Ojibwe) poet Al Hunter’s “I Am Going to Drink Tonight” in Beautiful Razor (2012):
…This belly up to the bar poem
I am going to drink
This poem tonight
This smoky bar poem
I am going to drink
This poem tonight
This passed out poem
I am going to drink
This poem tonight…
In Shara McCallum’s “Tam O’Shanter” in No Ruined Stone (2021), which imagines Robert Burns’ Jamaican descendants, had he left Scotland for plantation work in 1786:
“In the wee hours returning from a Mason
gathering where I’d been bousing,
perchance the whiskey or wind and rain
that rose up round me howling muddled
my brain, but past and present agreed
to an exchange.”
In Chris Bose’s “Poverty Strikes You Again and Again Like a Cobra” in A Moon Made of Copper (2014) from the
N’laka’pamux/Secwepemc Nation poet:
“Lost at the racetrack after betting your last dollar and losing, then coming home hungry and nothing to take away the pain, that is poverty. Alone in the city and pills for breakfast is nothing poverty. Feeling nothing towards death, that is poverty, and the absence time is further evidence of poverty.”
In “Little Cree Girls,” from Unearthing Secrets Gathering Truths (2018) by Cree poet Jules Arita Koostachin, which reminds me of Jacqueline Woodson’s brown girl dreaming:
I leave my fiend with the yelling me
it feels wrong
something tells me to stay to protect her
I turn to her
I cry
she pushes me again
this is the last time I see her.
In “The Book of Mycah” in Joshua Bennett’s Owed (2020):
“For a second, you would almost swear he was running through the gunfire, preparing for liftoff or something, little cousin held firmly in his arms, shielded from the onslaught. They never would have caught him if he hadn’t been holding that child, said no one, though we all thought it during the weeks following that moment we each froze, the moment his body collapsed slow as petals upon the unremarkable cement, & we stared at our chamption felled by an outcome so common ae don’t even have a special name for it. Still.”
In Thomas King’s 44 of 77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin (2019), which the publisher describes as a “eulogy for what we have squandered”:
For those of us who live to take
no sacrifice becomes too great
for someone else’s child to make.
Bushes burn.
Planets turn.
Soft men bring down the heavens with their lies.
We live in hardening times.
Number 27 reads: “Let us now celebrate prisons.”
Which brings us full-circle to Reginald Dwayne Betts, who found a different kind of freedom, through letters, while he was incarcerated.
I concur with your other commenter, you are so good at reviewing poetry! And picking our good lines too. The Thomas King poem is especially good, I think he has such a wonderful way with words, even when the topic is difficult, it’s still beautiful!
It’s much more interesting reading a variety of poetry, rather than just a collection or two, constantly feeling as though I’m “missing the point” (several points) and, of course, Thomas King pulls me in the direction of whatever he’s writing.
You are an excellent writer about poetry, you make me almost want to read it. I have the problem with poems that I have with short stories, each one makes you experience an emotion and then you move on to the next one.
Almost! Hah I’m not confident in my poetry reading skills, but I’m trying to read more, like slowing building a habit, like one more push-up each week!
That’s true, but I don’t think that’s a reason not to read it/them, perhaps just a reason not to binge-read it/them. Not that I’m trying to convince you: you’ve got plenty of good reading ahead of you.