Jennifer Clarvoe, Piano Piano, Unbound Editions
Maggie Dietz, If You Would Let Me, Four Way Books
Gail Mazur, World on a String, Arrowsmith Press
Lloyd Schwartz, Arthur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948), Arrowsmith Press
In Florida for the winter, I don’t get to many readings. I was eager, then, to hear three of these poets at the Blacksmith House when I came back in the spring (I was still in Florida for Gail Mazur’s book debut). All four books found me dazzled, each in its inimitable way. In Lloyd Schwartz and Gail Mazur, I found the pared-down essence of a sensibility and style developed over five decades. Maggie Dietz and Jennifer Clarvoe’s collections offer a gyre of tensions––often poised in counterpoint, sometimes stirred to a crescendo.
Dietz frames If You Would Let Me with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. In contemporary hands, it’s been used as a metaphor for a rupture between mother and daughter in adolescence––think Eavan Boland’s “Pomegranate.” Such is the case with Dietz. Parsing the story of an estrangement that thrusts parent and child into separate hells, Dietz uses every technique at her command to expose and contain her love and rage. Nursery rhymes, the heartbeat of meter, the whisper and presence of forms like sonnet and villanelle––all delineate the pain of the stolen and the left behind.
The book’s first, title poem is a villanelle, its repeated pleas of “hold” and “need” foreshadowing all that will be rejected. In “Emergency Fugue,” fragments of nursery rhymes and childhood songs collide with the details of a 911 call. The rhythm and off-rhymes of “Nobody”––almost those of a lullaby––become a croon of desolation: “You/asked for a pillar/a dollar some cover/and nobody answered/nobody showed.” Strictures enclose matter that would otherwise be impossible to touch. When Demeter’s anguish and wrath explodes in “The Things I Do,” the poem is an unpunctuated tumult of words no sentence can contain: “Before I burned the earth I tore my hair someone/could have stopped me then the branches I ignited/were to seed my search a speeding bird I scoured/land and sea for my lost cause and stolen seed…” Dietz’s language can be channeled by form, or run as turbulent as the pressure behind a dam. Either way, If You Would Let Me generates a current that illuminates and shocks.
Piano Piano also offers a world in need of repair. Many of Clarvoe’s poems dwell on loss and restoration, both present and in memory. In “Failure,” Clarvoe mishears words in a talk on the conservation of artifacts as adding “failure” rather than “value” to an ancient object; as “slowly it dawns/on me that what I hear is not (as I’d thought),” she perceives how “each crooked scar” transmutes to “a sign,/in fact, of care.”
Clarvoe’s poems are playful and quirky, generous with irregular internal and end rhymes that, like the repeated words in a sestina, add a countermeasure with their syncopated rhythm. Her close-ups of nature remind me of Marianne Moore––not the form, but the mind at play that takes videos of bees visiting a potted plant outside her window in “Bee in the Begonia,” or of the snail in “On the Road Between the Keats House and the Freud House,” whose path is “the glistening links/of a delicate, silver chain,/punctuated by filigree rosettes, like tiny rose-windows.” Midway between art and psychology wends the slowpoke snail, making beauty from slime in a way that invokes churches and rosaries.
“The Missing” begins with a list––“The missing glasses./The missing glass jars./The missing book”––then coalesces into meaning with, “Did you take my glasses by mistake?/Where did you put the missing jars?” This sounds like typical domestic confusion––“I wanted the jar for the marigolds…//You’ll see…when you come back,” until the last words of the line alert us to the beloved’s absence. “The loss doesn’t happen until I feel/that something is missing,” Clarvoe writes; simultaneously, the reader feels it too. Meticulously observed and meticulously made, the poems in Piano Piano recover bits and slivers, shaped by the poet’s hand into fullness.
World on a String is Gail Mazur’s ninth book of poems. As always, she’s a close observer of the human heart and the sensibility of a mind at work. Added to these is a toughness distilled from, and in the face of, love and grief that’s unblinking and unswerving. “Nobody Fucks with Me,” she titles one poem: “Wasn’t that why I chose to do//what I chose to do? …/still trying to make what I need to make.” Elegiac yet redolent of a life in art––rich in friends, fellow-writers, and family that made her––World on a String could serve as Mazur’s ars poetica.
In “Three Trees,” her husband works on a drawing, “…those trees…/as close as if your charcoal had been made of them.” Wanting “to be inside…your working mind,” Mazur asks “what you’d been thinking when you drew;” “tree tree tree” is the response––not “trees,” but a line of three equally stressed syllables, spare and individual, pure as a struck note. “Inscription” recalls a friend of Robert Lowell’s asking the poet “how he’d want to be remembered.” Lowell replies, in the poem’s only one-word, one-line stanza, “Heartbreaking.” “One word/for all the history, intelligence,/ pain and wit––” the poems concludes with a dash, sign of things left unfinished, a conclusion without end.
Pain and wit join in elegies for Mazur’s mother and a feisty aunt––“no good protest/you couldn’t summon exultant diehard support for”––who, when told that “God’s in all of us you know,” explodes “in panic,/…Then get him the hell out of me!” Delivered ten boxes of matzoh “As if to mock my widowhood,/as if to deride my pandemic isolation,” Mazur concludes, “in your crisp hard plenitude today you ridicule/and tend to amuse me, oh believe me, I’ve never/forgotten…/…my people’s exodus––/so yes I will eat, and eat alone, until the day comes/when I can eat no more of our unleavened bread.” In World on a String, Mazur’s singular, unaccommodating acuity of what will leave us all bereft of love and work animates her passion for the living and the lost.
I’ll refer to Lloyd Schwartz’s expansive, compassionate new book as Schnabel/Szigeti. Its pages are packed with references which, throughout his work, have concerned the poet most. In “Corona Blues,” the bureaucratic hurdles dodged so a couple can marry, just before the pandemic lockdown, read like the script of a beloved screwball comedy. Disaster prompts the marriage––“if we get the virus, we want to get it together”––as well as the poem’s conclusion, months later, in a cemetery: “People we like are buried there.//A few days later, we put down a payment on a plot.” Comedy and tragedy meld in sequences that feel like life unfolding as it is lived. Written in Schwartz’s one-sentence stanzas that look a bit like a movie script, the poem offers its understated reflections––“People we like are buried there”!––in plain language cats and dogs can read.
Plain, but never simple. “In Purgatory” repeats a litany of words and phrases with shifting emphasis, a technique familiar from Schwartz’s tour de force of a sestina, “Six Words.” Here, the poet’s narrative evokes the circularity of despair. Beginning with statements––“Not easy//Nothing came easy.”––the poem pivots to questions: “Did everything have to be so hard?//Harder than it had to be?//So much harder?//Everything?” and ends with an image of the speaker at the mirror: “Look!//There’s no explanation.//Nothing comes easy.//Harder than it has to be.//Everything.” I count only 25 words deployed in a two-page poem that, while brisking the reader through its mirror-refracted dimensions, enacts how it feels to be stuck there.
Schwartz’s trust in ordinary speech embraces the political. “Lucifer in New York” is a compendium of quotes on the devastation of 9/11; the resulting ensemble is almost symphonic. “Rubble” mourns the destruction of Gaza through the bombing of an English-language library begun by the Palestinian writer, Mosah Abu Toha. “Angel” asks if Schindler saved Jews “to profit his soul, or to make a profit?” The title “Unexpected Oracles” could refer to Schwatrz’s gathered quotations or to the nature of ordinary speech–– from funny to bleak, from “My dad works on the Constitution––you know, that boat,” to “Teaching history was like looking in a mirror and seeing nothing.” The poet, relishing the pungency of human expression, amplifies what readers perceive as art.
Schwartz is a Pulitzer Prize winning music critic, and the title poem is an exegesis of a performance that shouldn’t exist. Signed to different record labels, the violinist Szigeti and the pianist Schnabel––“Ella and Louie––her heavenly sweetness, his earthy growl”––play Mozart in a bootleg concert recording. Beginning, perhaps, with a political jab needling the dependence of art on commerce, the poem creates a musical marriage––and questions whether two great artists can play together in a work that requires, like a good match, “Not just a soloist with an accompanist.// Collaborators // Conspirators.” After asking “Can there be a happy ending?” the poem concludes, “Yes, they say––yes, we’re all right, it’s all right.” Throughout Schnabel/Szigeti, the arc of Schwartz’s moral universe is long, and suffused with pain––but it bends toward love.
In this age of A.I. slop, it’s important to praise and support these independent presses that continue, though daunted, to bring human words to human readers. Despite the murder of the NEA, the political tiptoe by small colleges and big universities, and the corrupt creep of censorship, Arrowsmith Press, Four Way Books, and Unbound Editions get the job done. Support them.