WE ALWAYS WANT ‘MORE’
Whether it’s life, poetry or 12 grain bread
The travails of age and loss run through Arlene Weiner’s most recent poetry collection, “More.” Weiner, a longtime Pittsburgher who belongs to both the Squirrel Hill and Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange poetry groups, plays with form and expectation in this eclectic collection to great success.
Her villanelle “Another Art” has an epigraph from Elizabeth Bishop’s famous villanelle “One Art” — “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” — and begins with the lines, “The art of tossing is another thing / I’m trying, really trying, to get clear. / So many objects seem to want to cling.”
The speaker, who admits being “afraid I’m weakening,” laments how the reluctance to toss may have to bow to the inevitability of loss.
The desire to oppose and arrest age informs the poem “Eighty,” which also has an epigraph, said by “a liar — Age is just a number.”
In the first line, the speaker says the number of years in the title is one “I boggle at, a hurdle.” But by the end, she is envisioning cantering or galloping over it, and reminds herself not to “boggle at the obstacle; // horse people know that to boggle, / to lose confidence, is fatal. To fall.” The poet captures a central conundrum of aging: One should not push too hard, but it may be an even greater mistake to hesitate.
The power of place to frame and redefine memories is a strong theme in the book. In “The All-American Truck Stop,” she remembers that, though the Carlisle, Pa., business was a “habitual” stop for her family, “It took quite a while before…. / I realized / [it] / was named for Jim Thorpe, All-American.” The truck stop, now gone, stands as a chance, in her mind, to still honor Jim Thorpe and “honor to those / who honored him.”
The poet’s meditative memory revives legacy and lineage, even as she recalls that it was all “vacant, up for sale” on her last visit.
In reviewing her previous book, “City Bird” (2016), Fred Shaw wrote that it was the “imagistic moments” that stood out among many “informational” poems. What stands out in the new book is a thoughtful and questioning spirit.
In the title poem,
Weiner muses about a bag of 12 grain bread: “…I laugh. If one grain is good, should twelve / be better? Are there twelve good grains?”
In the book’s final poem, “While I Live,” she concludes: “Grief hoards the good and weeps / the human question, Why not more, / more life? For we hold our lost loves, / restored, only when we sleep.”
These two poems show Ms. Weiner’s remarkable range, switching as they do between the jocular probing of the first and the dramatic, metaphorical Shakespearean language of the second.
Weiner’s roots are in the Bronx, and her mother passed away there early in the pandemic, at the age of 104. In “Paper Boats,” the poet addresses her own son while also looking back at her mother’s hold on her: “My mother folded her life into me, / looked to unfold me and read her story, / but you are not my letter to the world.”
This tension folds into devotion in “For My Mother,” with the poet wondering, “How can I embrace you when you were my sky?,” and ending satisfied to not “look for you in the stars — / Your constellation shines on earth.”
There is a funny and wistful poem about dead people on Facebook, a poem reflecting on the infamous recent collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge, and another that describes what grandchildren care about, by rhyming “Higgs boson” with “Groucho nose on.” These just add to the wide range of subjects, tones and styles. This book befits the wisdom of age and the lessons of loss, and leaves us, like the poet, wanting “More.”