Seeing the World Through Books

“A needle must feel

deeply needled, ill-

suited to its skin,

to leave its arrow-

straight ways, to stray

into a haystack…”—from “In a Haystack.”

I can honestly say that I have never sat down before with a new book of poetry and found myself so engrossed that I read the entire book in one leisurely sitting.  Sure, as a student I may have come close to duplicating that experience during an all-nighter with a paper due the next morning, but then I didn’t experience the poems’ pleasure, and probably didn’t read the whole collection, preferring instead to search for nuggets I could quote for credit.  This collection by Andrea Cohen is different—special—so fresh, so accessible, and so exciting in its imagery, irony, humor, and honest sentiment, that time became irrelevant for me when I was reading.  In the course of three hours, I was laughing, smiling in knowing agreement at new insights, loving the “a-ha” moments when I finally “got” what the poet’s image was all about, weeping at the unvarnished treatment of death in some poems which evoked sorrows of my own, and loving the intimacy of sharing so many events with a woman I had met only briefly but whom I now know better than some of my “closest” friends.

I have reread most of these poems now, and have found ever more subtleties to admire in each line.  I have read them to my (former English major) husband while he has been driving the car, and I have recommended them to several friends who also love wonderful writing.  Cohen’s writing is absolutely clear (no fuzzy images and contorted syntax) and clean in its structure—the poems are composed, not the result of unstructured free writing in which the poet so often celebrates himself and the primacy of his own every utterance.  Her poems often consist of stanzas of equal lengths, with a single line at the end to secure the final idea and give it emphasis. “Current Events,” for example, consists of three-line stanzas, each line having three stresses, as the poet lists perfect moments in time—the Asian pears at peak, starlings stringing their nests with hairnets and Christmas lights, a paperboy happy at the weight of his papers– following them with a single line, ordering the reader to “praise, and praise, and praise.”

Andrea Cohen is a communicator, a woman who speaks from the heart without treacly sentiment, a poet so skilled in all the arts of poesy that she can match her metrics to the cadences of everyday speech.  In the quotation from “In a Haystack,” at the top of this review, for example, six, two-stress lines are read as one easily understood sentence, without all the pauses and heavy beats of most nineteenth century poetry and without the blankness of much twentieth century verse.  Many poems, like the one above, offer unique points of view.  In this case, the needle is on an adventure, imagining its “one good eye [filled] with the filament of pasture,”  or itself as “pillow to the weary,”  or as “supper to the bell-necklaced goats.”   The conclusion is  a cheerful and unusual comment on imagination, adventure, and daring to be different.

“To an Ant Fallen in the Salt Shaker” is a humorous reminder to an ant, who may have been looking for sugar instead, that the sweetness [of life] requires hard work.  “The lair of sugar is heavy-lidded,” and “if the way in to/ sweetness seems direct/ and seamless, beware…”      “The Song of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker” is a powerful indictment made by a  bird now thought extinct.  This woodpecker’s death as the last of his species has occurred because of the species’ refusal to “adapt to cruelty…You do not mourn my passing/ but what you always lacked.”

Many poems recall Cohen’s childhood, her family, and the important moments in her early life in the South—saying thank you to the trash pick-up man, listening to her sister during the year that her sister sang everything including directions on how to tie shoes, the day she was bitten by a snake and needed an “anti-boat,” the ride when the family car killed an eight-point buck, and the “ideal day” her father shared with her and her siblings.  But many other poems are from adult life, a powerful, heart-stopping poem on the death of her brother, the killing of the animals in the zoo in Palestine, and issues of love:  while loving and losing may be hard, she believes, “to have loved and never/ had, to be chained/ to the imagined, its expense/ account without bounds,”  that’s harder still.  Andrea Cohen is a poet whose imagery and clarity of vision combine with the clean structure of her language and verse to create poems which communicate on all levels, some of them humorous, some of them ineffably sad, and all of them unique.  This book is on my list of Favorites for 2009.

Notes: The author’s photo appears on the Watertown, MA library blog  http://watertownlibrary.wordpress.com

Some of Andrea Cohen’s poems may be read here: www.memorious.org

My note about the MacDowell Colony and its mission appears here: http://marywhipplereviews.com

The photo of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker appears on Nature’s Crusaders:  http://naturescrusaders.wordpress.com