It would be a shock to know that anyone ever accused this poet of being boring. She is the opposite of boring throughout this collection. She is plain spoken, lucid, clear, in poems neither plain nor predictable. She masters metaphor, personification, the surreal image, the exacting comment, always with her finger on the pulse of humanity. These poems are unique entities, little word-worlds about being human. They are about what is lost, what is found, and what changes in her life and in the lives of her readers.
Fox neither shies from nor dwells on loss; she gives loss the emotional import of a human being who cares about the past, the present, and the future. These poems are art, and also in their clarity the voice of one human being talking to another.
This art/life dynamic is alive and well in “Impossible Landscapes.” The use of imagery—a silk scarf, an armchair—is brilliant, and prepares readers for the poignant sense of loss in the poem’s conclusion:
Your smile painted landscapes
I store in the attic,
believing they’ll call you
and bring you back home.
Throughout the collection, there is an awareness of loss, of people, places, things, and the idea that no one and nothing lasts forever. That’s life, that’s reality, the poet suggests.
In “I am a settler settling” she states, “my past tense/ is my luggage that retired somewhere else.”
In “Living in Time” she clearly remembers, “I bought this jacket…” but where exactly? “At the corner of here and there, from a shop between then and maybe.” Memory is ironic, at once clear and vague. Tricky.
These poems are very much about what is found. An example of the value of the found thing is rendered in a metaphor that concludes “Water.” Here is the second half of that poem.
He swept her away,
pulled her under.
He was a force
that left her breathless.
He tossed her aside,
a shipwrecked distress.
She clung to the driftwood
of mourning.
And that driftwood was her lifesaver.
In “Miracle in Glass” the found thing is a coffee pot, and in “Reflection on Priorities” a storefront. This poet knows the wisdom in the axiom: put things in your poems, readers can latch on to things.
Life involves looking back and looking ahead, mostly being here. That being involves change. Life is change. “Summer Slips” quietly mourns seasonal change, as the red leaves of autumn turn brown in winter and fall from the trees. A vivid sense of change is evoked by sight, “Red slips, a slinker/, tipping tiptoe on the leaves,” and by sound, “A final grasp, a breath of wind/ to gasp and rasp of autumn.” The brown leaves crumble in hand and crunch under foot, their presence, as those of the red and yellow leaves highlighted by the poet’s imagination and her skill with words.
These poems are imaginative, insightful, lyrical works of art. In each, the poet captures some illusive thing, a fleeting moment in her life and in the lives of her readers.
In “Deadbeat,” the speaker’s shadow “borrowed spare change/ from the coin jar.” Who would have thought of that? Such a surreal, original image.
In “Don’t Dwell,” she says “we catch and cage our flighty souls” and then, “They long to soar where we can’t see, but fade in gold captivity.” Readers sense a pleasure in the capturing and the caging, in what the poet puts on the page and gives her readers: the sight, sound, sense of the made thing, poems by a poet at the height of her powers.
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Published by: Cyberwit.net
Number of pages: 66
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/8119654242?ref_=pe_93986420_774957520
Copyright © 2023 Pete Mladinic. All rights reserved.
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