It’s a surprise to me when a poet breaks through to some greater public consciousness. Mary Oliver’s recent death and the outpouring of appreciation for her work on Twitter and Facebook proves that a general readership does have a need for, even a thirst for, poetry. And it doesn’t hurt, these days, if lines from those poems make great Facebook posts or tweets. But it would be a shame if readers failed to look beyond that. Do we really want only poetry that would look good on a Successories poster?
Madison poet Marilyn Annucci’s work escapes the trap of easy Facebook quotability. Answers are not so easy to find in Annucci’s recent collection The Arrows That Choose Us (Press 53, 2018), yet the questions prove irresistible.
The title poem is no fortune-cookie-level message about fate, as it might be in lesser hands. Its urgency (“whatever is needed to tear us awake”) carries through the volume. The poems often look back to a simpler, pre-tech past. “Houdini Escapes the Time Capsule” whimsically reimagines the magician in our contemporary landscape, surrounded by technology and commerce, Walmarts and ATMs, “the need for escape even greater,” he thinks.
Even so, the past is often bittersweet, as in the beautiful “I was an ocean away,” a meditation on a long-ago summer abroad, again centered in a pre-tech past (“Nineteen and no e-mail, no Instant Message, no chat”). The speaker ponders the extent to which we ever reach others, despite all the ways we now have to be in touch.
“Wrecked World,” an extended metaphor based on doing the dishes, asks “Were you wrong to dredge it up?” — the “dangerous material, where the knives lie.” The dredging — the basis of this collection — while dangerous, is, ultimately, necessary.
Milwaukee poet DeWitt Clinton’s work has the ring of more straightforward narrative. His collection, At the End of the War (Kelsay Books, 2018), frequently turns to war, as the title suggests, but also to family history, paintings, and the imaginings of the doings of Biblical figures and the ancient Greeks.
These poems are rooted in history and tradition, but don’t always avoid flights of fancy — after all, the birthright of a poem. In “Job’s Comforters Fly Over Wisconsin,” the speaker is joined in his car by three advice-dispensing cranes, creating an unusual epiphany. And “On the Way to Church Camp, Mother Meets the Devil” is a folksy, rollicking tale.
Yet the overriding mood of the collection is dark, dominated by a long prose poem on the Holocaust. A companion poem of sorts, “Reading the Tao at Auschwitz,” is not without consolation, though — rooted in the healing power of nature: “Make the skies darken/Make the skies brighten/Let the living start to come back/Let it be a place of memory.”
Marilyn Annucci and DeWitt Clinton will read from their work at 6 p.m. on Feb. 1 at A Room of One’s Own.
