Start Again
Miriam Sagan’s Start Again could be a primer on the beauty of northern New Mexico. Chock-full of geographical, cultural, and ecological references, the poems included in this collection sketch the region through simple but effective portraits: “snow in the mountains / the capital city / nestled at the foot / of the Sangre de Cristo mountains.” Here, the act of naming (the Pecos, Agua Fria Street, and Rancho de Taos, as other examples) feels like a deliberate effort to fix locales in place, as if to counterbalance the collection’s other focus on change and ephemerality.
In some poems, Sagan directly addresses themes such as the inexorability of aging:
no bouquet
of paper flowers
pulled from your ear
can cure time
and its progression
to the old woman
But the force of change is everywhere in these poems, especially in vivid landscapes, such as this one from “Parallel Lines”:
at sunset, Jemez mountains
disappear
dark, glowing clouds
bring something else.
Such imagism draws on Asian influences, and religion—Buddhism in particular—is a unifying principle in this collection. Many stanzas read like koans, others evoke Buddhist themes (“the metal Buddha / cast from the emptiness of a mold”), and yet others are imbued with a Buddhist-inflected absurdism:
the baby has a fate
I can’t read
she likes to open
a board book
then
put it in her mouth.
Through a simultaneous insistence on fixing things in place, and an openness to the fundamental fluidity of existence, Sagan’s poems evince a sense of time and presence as sacred, in their portrayal of people, creatures, and cultures that leave traces behind long after they’ve disappeared. Some of the collection’s most memorable moments occur when spirituality intersects with or emerges out of the material realities of the everyday. In the closing lines of the very first poem, the poet captures the wonder of watching things come and go, mesmerized by the flickering dance of it all:
it’s dark now, and I don’t know
which neon sign is prettierVACANCY or
NO VACANCY.
Purchase