recent-ish reading (poetry)

[zirconium]

Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees, Giraffes Can't Dance (Orchard, 1999). A rhyming picture book about Gerald, a giraffe who's mocked mercilessly for poor dancing, but finds the right music with the help of a kind cricket. (This hits a very personal note for me, as someone who was made fun of in junior high for not knowing how to dance. Which, as noted elsewhere, is no longer the case.)

Arthur Russell, At the Car Wash (Rattle, 2023). A chapbook by a New Jersey attorney and landlord, about his youth and family in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The poems that stood out to me were "New Year's Eve," about his mother ("'You guys' was an actual color of light in her eyes"); "The Heavier Stone," which begins with "My dad died eight years ago. / Our relationship has improved a lot since then"; and "Unencumbered," a long poem about what we carry:

... I've learned that emotion conducts
some memories to the left and others to the right;
that feelings brand events for keeps
and segregate archival stuff from what
is only "by the way." The more that you remember,
the more there is of life, the more of time there is;
but time gathers in the past and drags you
back by the belt;
and when I think of how much trouble
I have had with emotion, I remind myself
of a stop sign in a hurricane...

Coincidentally, Russell wrote today's "Poets Respond" feature - "Gravity in Jerusalem."

(Coincident because I'm typing this while waiting for my phone to finish recharging so I can venture out to Novelette and the book shop in hopes of wrapping up [so to speak] this year's Christmas shopping. That was the plan yesterday, but tornado sirens woke me from my nap, so.)

In Rattle's Fall 2023 issue, José A. Alcántara's "To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God" bears witness both to unbelief and faith.