Poems for the high desert
A debut collection riffs on Sappho, while another lands the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize
SOMEONE ELSE’S EARTH: POEMS By Margaret Lee
Finishing Line Press (2021, 27 pp.)
Dazzlingly imaginative, these poems that “riff” on intriguing lyrical fragments left by the Archaic poet Sappho, ca. 630-570 BCE, are also a feat of scholarly chutzpah. A Greek language and New Testament academic, author Margaret Lee is also a disciple of the Southwest landscape and a fiber artist, and in these 20 evocative poems she manages to weave together all of the above. Imagine taking two Sappho lines, “bottom … in faint cries,” and creating this breathless meditation on “Quarantine”:
“At the bottom of isolation
The days pile up like dirty laundry. Their edges dissolve into the expanding heap —
Time no longer marks them until Innate rhythms peck from inside their shells.
Then, in faint cries,
They speak.”
Lee sounds these elusive fragments, and worlds emerge – from Sappho’s rueful “I used to braid coronets,” the modern poet creates in “Clover Dance” a complete memory of childhood dreaming amid the “shaggy grass tips/ of neglected turf,” plucking clover blossoms “with delicate, little-girl fingers.”
The reader delights from one poem to the next in how this clever poet is
going to fashion her artistry from Sappho’s sparse clues. In “Desert Yearning,” the ancient poet’s suspended phrase “neither the honey nor the bee for me” becomes in Lee’s creation an incandescent juxtaposition of the gooey “golden excess” of a dripping honeycomb with the preferred hard edges of the high desert:
“No hopeful buzzing, pregnant With the promise of sticky sweet … Enticing the desire for more, more …
No. Abandon me to the desert Among the chamisa and sage …. Only wind traffic across the plateau – sometimes subtle, sometimes rumbling with pressure, always endless – ”
From Sappho’s barest fragment “epic-weaver,” Lee generously synthesizes the roles both of the weaver and the songstress in her poem “The Damask of Our Days.” Here she draws from her intimate knowledge of the fiber arts. Lee’s “Epic-weaver” becomes the great muse “O Voice within,/who
hears melodies/where others find only broken threads.” She is the masterly
poet who takes the random strands and from “split seams and edges unraveling,/they become the woolly weft/of life’s tapestry.”
Or how about a paean to “Hope” from one improbable word that Sappho left – celery:
“sucking water from the Earth,/ Resisting life’s crunch With string threads of resolve.”
BEFORE I HAD
THE WORD: POEMS
By Brooke Sahni
Texas Review Press (2021, 58 pp.)
Layers of sacred teaching, Jewish and Sikh, inform these youthful reflections on language and identity by Brooke Sahni, author of “Divining.” The poet, herself from both heritages, writes how a deeper knowledge of each has forged her love of words, such as in this opening of the poem “Sikh Coming from the Punjabi Meaning Disciple or Seeker”:
“The English root of Sikh
Is seek, learn or study for years, I thought
To be a disciple meant I must grow Down into a small thing – there was no seeking, just surrender.”
Elsewhere, in “G-d, a Portrait,” the poet resonates with her Jewish
upbringing, grappling from her earliest memory with the concept of “g-o-d”
by drawing and coloring anything she could think of – “human hands, the
golden breakfast yolk,/thick-skinned tree – knowing somewhere it was all correct.”
Childhood memories fall together with mourning for relatives who take
their precious old-world knowledge with them; desire to adhere to ancient
traditions vie with moments of sensual adolescent self-discovery. And even the
poem titles – “Creation Myth,” “Notes on Midrash,” “Divine Law” – underscore the tension in the poet’s ceaseless seeking.
In “Reform,” she muses about the Old Testament prophet Miriam, drawing words from her well as if water, and being the metaphor of the “far-reaching taproot” of her people. As well her name derives from the Hebrew word
for “bitter,” and evokes for the poet the arid landscape of New Mexico she has chosen to relocate to:
“Ask me not to think of the bitterroot, Purple-petaled flower, named
For its ability to regenerate from dry
Seemingly dead roots and no one Calls it supernatural, just science.”