Recently I judged North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Book Award and after reading and re-reading the finalist entries, I chose the one that demonstrated a maturity of craft and an honesty of emotion.
I chose the book that showed me a poet who loved the artistry and musicality of poetry, and whose work I could recollect days later as I was navigating the congested streets of New York City. I am quite fond of this book, Keep and Give Away by Susan Meyers, because it opened a fascinating landscape for me—a place where the metaphors of nature are surprising and vibrant, and relevant to those who make sense of the chaotic world through its startling imagery. I offer the opening poem:
Contraries
You sit on the front steps in love
with the little birds, the finches
& sparrows fidgeting from leafy cover,
not that they need you
cheering them on to eat the seed
at the feeders hung just for them—
sunflower, millet, a white sock of thistle;
but when the hawk lowers its broad
red shoulders and sits, alone,
on the limb of the cherry tree,
after the little birds, seeing it coming,
have scattered like ifs and whens
you pull for the hawk, admiring
its heft, the turn of its head,
not to mention the unblenched eyes,
its black-bended tail. How could you not
root for this brown serenity lifting off,
grudgeless and oblivious to grudge?
Now the finches and sparrows are back
with two chickadees, all astir,
flitting their soft agitation.
Once again you fall
for the little birds, their flutter
of yeses quickening air.
How fickle we humans are, how child-like in our affinity toward wonder and indecisiveness, but also how complex. The speaker of this poem invites us identify with the gregarious “little birds” but also relate to the stoic, solitary hawk. Indeed, we are vulnerable and powerful all at once, and our imaginations can shift easily between the spaces of extremes.
I’m also tickled by the anthropomorphism of the “little words”—if, when, and yes—an echo of the smaller creatures in the poem. Both are seemingly innocuous clusters (of wings, of letters) that, given the right motivation, can take flight.
Meyers’ first full-length book also received The South Carolina Poetry Book Prize.
(From Keep and Give Away, published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Used with the permission of the author.)
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