A detour into a volume of poetry for me, as a break from Halberstam’s interesting but lengthy tome about the 1950s, which book I’d posted about earlier in here.
A Piece of Good News -- Katie Peterson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019).
From a review in the NYT:
Peterson’s prickly, playful book is filled with quasi parables (including a poem called “New Parable”) that often keep an attractive distance from their own sponsoring emotions — attractive in part because when Peterson chooses to narrow that gap, the results are striking.
So we pass from “The Fountain,” a knottily delightful examination of what it means to make something — a statue of a woman by a fountain, a poem, a relationship with an audience — to “The Massachusetts Book of the Dead,” a series of short poems focused on the death of Peterson’s mother that includes these almost brutally straightforward lines:
My mother died at nine o’clock at night.
I will be awake
past my bedtime forever.
It’s as if a fable split open and a diary page fell out. Poetry is always about what’s being said and not said, but rarely are the two so expertly intertwined.
Me, I always enjoy a collection of poems where certain lines stand out for me even when I've no idea what the poet may have had in mind when they fell from the pen... this is from a poem in there titled "The Bargain":
But when the sun goes down, you
wonder what it weighs.
I'm a huge fan of ambiguity and nuance, and often find the very idea of doubt or uncertainty energizing, so it's probably not strange that I like dipping into poetry where I get to say "I don't know what that means, and it's so great!" without giving a damn whether anyone else would find whatever it was quite clear and straightforward. Reading poetry for me is sort of like sketching a novel on the fly, from an outline a poet happened to drop in the road.
