Hamesh Wyatt reviews works of poetry from Fiona Farrell, Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver.
Fiona Farrell
Otago University Press
Fiona Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years. Nouns, Verbs, Etc. collects her best work and intersperses them with other poems thus far ‘uncollected’.
Political, personal, regional, global poems all get aired. There are themes of birth, death, war, emigration, history and landscape. She writes with clarity and warmth, dealing with difficult and disturbing subjects.
Farrell tells stories in verse like in her five-page “The Lament of the Nun of Beare”. It concludes:
... I have taken in strangers,
I have done my best.
Now the Son of Man
is my only guest.
Happy the island
in the midst of the sea,
for flood follows ebb.
But not for me.
Sad my dwelling and
empty on this bare day.
I must learn from
my sadness:
that all ebbs away.
Farrell pours out her feelings. I’m sure she has a whole lot more up her sleeve.
Margaret Atwood
Penguin Random House
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays, including The Handmaid’s Tale and Booker Prize winning The Testaments.
In Dearly Atwood has death on her mind. There is an air of sadness and loss. Zombies, aliens, a dying planet all feature.
I like Atwood’s nod to Elisabeth Moss from The Invisible Man. Her “Songs for Murdered Sisters” begins:
Who was my sister
Is now an empty chair
Is no longer,
Is no longer there
She is now emptiness
She is now air
These are finely honed, tightly arranged poems.
Barbara Kingsolver
Faber & Faber
Barbara Kingsolver is entertaining, wise and witty in her writing. She penned the popular novels The Poisonwood Bible and Unsheltered.
...Lord of leaves and fishes, lead me across this great divide.
Teach me how to love the sacred places, not as one
devotes to One who made me in his image and is bound
to love me back. I mean as a body loves its microbial skin,
the worm its nape of loam, all secret otherness forgiven.
Love beyond anything I will ever make of it.
Kingsolver’s “My Mother’s Last Forty Minutes” is stunning as is her trip to Pompeii. Her poems drive and drift and change shape and tone as the reader spends more time with them.
These three unmissable books are great summer reading.
Hamesh Wyatt lives in Bluff. He reads and writes poetry
