By Kate Light
The West Chester University Poetry Center
79 pages
$14.95
By Alexander C. Kafka
Many of these poems focus on her ambivalent and troubled passions. They speak eloquently of rocky love affairs, romantic and musical. (Light is also a professional violinist who evidently feels somewhat chained to her instrument.) Other poems explore the legacies of childhood experiences, particularly family neuroses and perceived slights. All have the fine rounded textures of work that has been refigured and polished repeatedly and painstakingly. They are priceless psychic figurines, and their creation is also a subject Light explores."If you speak, or blink, commit something new to ink,/it becomes ... mind-of-its-own ... a kind of True," she writes in "Poem." "You are a piece of it, and it of you./You woke suddenly, and it awakened too."
The nexus between poetry and love is surveyed in "Tale." Comparing poets to gloriously ornate peacocks, Light writes:
This is where the poets would be blessed--
their words score highest, and consummate.
Oh I see. So what they lack in fancy fins or tail,
dancing ability, height, whatever you care
to make the list, they soar up the sliding scale
with wings of words; and how well they share
determines if their objects of desire advance to mate
with them, come away with them, stay with them, or leave.
That is one of many things one may believe.
Light, as you can see, brings a playfulness to her imagery, and to her wording. She most directly revels in it in the wistful "Zeug-O-Matic."
These foolish things happen and remind me of you.
It is a far cry and country.
You have a big day ahead and heart.
There is a lack and time.
There comes the train and strangest moment.
I like her style and anyway.
Then the sea sighed.
You miss the boat and him.
The melancholy twist of that last line sneaks up on you.
That "Then the sea sighed" bounces back to us as the title of a later poem in which Light demonstrates that if her imagination plays mostly in the fields of her own heart, she's not blind to the savage larger world, or at least not blind to how so many of us are blind to it.
We've got military strength and we have shown it;
still we want our quiet nights and shopping days.
Weddings have wound up in many places,
all around the world and right here in our hands;
only to see the features blasted off of faces,
only to find the bodies buried in the sands.
It gets more bitterly ambivalent still (think of this next time you hector your child into practicing):
I gave up twenty years or so
on spec, to try to make the darn thing go.
I cannot even list
the sum of all the things I missed,
travel, money, fun, and straying,
though a greater fun was had by playing--
all that eternal repertoire.
That is what I did it for.
But now I rest the child well,
unwrest the case, the crown, the shell.
The book's most moving offerings, though, are its love poems, many in sonnet form. There are odes to damaged lovers and damaged loves in the title poem and the remarkable "Nicknames; or, Undoing the Snaps." There are expressions of patience with a fickle love, like "Seeing You Begin to Consider Loving," and the pained cries of love unrequited, as in "The Self-Taught Man." There are tales of bad romantic timing, like "She Can't Outrace the Lightning Arrows."
In "Absence," a woman wonders why, if absence makes her lover fonder, presence isn't more fulfilling to him.
Sometimes she cried inside the night.
Sometimes he held her, and she leaned toward
his chest, her fingers in his hair, his heart through
her heart, tempering her beat by beat.
Why then would he leave her, like something obsolete?
Layered between the meditations on love and loss are sensitive descriptions of aging and regret. In "What I Did to Time," she writes:
What I did to time was ball it up, and
throw it out, when I was unhappy,
years ago; chucked it, sprained my hand
wadding it tight, waiting for an end ...
Now I'd give anything to have that plethora, that stack;
to feel its truth and call its slow pace back.
In "Feeling for Two":
Well, here I am now with a few badges of waged war;
here I am growing older and less
floating in possibility, and I who waved flags of More, More,
want less of flags and more of happiness.
A place in the country, for quiet, for finding out what's true;
a few soft shirts, and lots of art, and you.
She finds reflection, and reflections, in the meeting of her life and her art, as in "The Halls."
Funny thing, since I've been far from home
I've written mainly couplets, as if the lines--
like me--can barely bear to be alone.
I used to make threads intertwine.
Now they lie neatly packed in rows.
Whatever's open wants to close.
Will this stop if I start favoring crude,
unfettered, freeflown solitude?
Perhaps it will if she does. However her loneliness might be resolved, one expects the lines will flow beautifully. As she writes in "Cleaning,"
As I learned to hear my mother's call
from upstairs, downstairs, down the hall;
so, still, I hear the sounds of test
and task and things that do not let me rest,
until I've tried to tame--or name--them all.
That burden on her part becomes pleasure on ours. That doesn't seem fair--or wouldn't, anyway, if she didn't have such remarkable poetry to show for it. However she tames things, she names them well.
