The poet’s truce with the world

Review of As Is: Poems, Julia Spicher Kasdorf (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023)

Late in Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s newest book of poems, the poet is in Dublin, besieged by a “spectacle” of gulls at a restaurant, as well as by the high drama of Irish history. A voice across the table (or from inside the poet?) asks: “Yes, but isn’t spectacle what we want?” The answer isn’t the one we expect:

What

we want, at our age, may be just to know

what we want—stir with a knife, trouble and strife—

and to live content with what we get. (76)

Which sounds like the shrug it most certainly is, an almost impossible wish for certainty that propels much of this fine book of poems from one of our best poets.

The book, like all of Kasdorf’s work, never shies from taking on the toughest issues we face: the pandemic, race relations, climate change, child abuse, gun violence, politics, teenagers. (Nobody writes about the complexities – and rewards – of motherhood better than Kasdorf). In “Testing,” the speaker is in mid-pandemic mode, awash in domestic chores – sewing, cleaning – as well as holding a vigil for an unnamed friend or relative:

Fourteen days on a ventilator, texts came, fifteen

mornings I lit a ruby cup and let the flame draw

oxygen from the living room until it was finished. (10)

“Hope is a thing with feathers. Hope is a thing//that breathes,” (9) the speaker says as if convincing herself that all is – or could be – well. Then she remembers Thomas Merton:

One cannot truly know hope, Merton

wrote, unless he has found how like despair

hope can be. (10)

From there, the poem continues not to sermon or explanation, but ends on an image of just how difficult it might be to judge while living in that world that blends hope and despair:

At dinner, we fell silent watching

a woman at the Little Free Library on our street.

She opened a book to read the flap, turned it to read

the back, then slowly returned it to choose another,

street light flickering on over her head. She looked

and looked until she finally left, taking nothing. (10)

If that image feels as if despair has outbalanced hope, compare “Luck,” where the poet visits her ill father who is being treated in the same hospital where her daughter was born. Her father is hooked up to a heart monitor, which triggers the poet’s memory of her newly born daughter’s heart,

Opening and closing

determined to beat—not like a drum or gong,

not like a clock, not even to pump like an engine,

but to surge—not with blood, but with light,

that held me a while at that threshold. (69-70)

And with the poet we hold that complex moment almost in our hands, weighing father’s heart against daughter’s heart in a sort of equivalence, a sort of hope, that has no resolution or answer beyond itself.

This kind of juggling of the present and past, hope and despair, layering them, looking for ways to reconcile them (although knowing how unlikely that is) is one of Kasdorf’s main strategies in many of these poems. In the book’s title poem (which I’ll surely damage with summarizing and excerpting – please buy the book and read this poem whole), the poet goes nearly as far back in the human past as is possible: to her and her daughter’s DNA. But how to reconcile her own predictable Dutch past with her daughter’s “that tells another tale: English Quakers, Dutch Mennonites, Jews/settled in Ukraine”? (27) Or how to reconcile the West Nickel Mines School shooting in Pennsylvania in 2006, the school “razed and planted in pasture” (28), with the vast violence of the Holocaust? A local rabbi said

if they had been Jews, a memorial would have gone up.

They would not forget. Five slain girls, not six million. (28)

Or what does it mean that her ancestor, Ulrich Spicher, came over on a boat owned by Benedict Arnold? Or that her students scorn a visiting poet for writing “by the sentence, not the line” (28) – something Kasdorf as their professor has certainly taught them. “I, too,” the poet confesses at the end of the poem, “write by the sentence,/ compose as is, then break my lines.” (29)

It’s a wonderful – and key – moment in the book, an acceptance of the tensions between knowing and doing, acknowledging the poem and the book itself as part of the poet’s truce with the world. And contentment? Knowing what we want? Maybe. Almost.

A short review can’t possibly exhaust the themes and pleasures of As Is. The book feels mostly narrative until you realize that half the poems’ titles point us toward trees or animals or the names of specific, natural places. In these poems, the natural world is both setting and antidote to the “spectacle” of the wider world; the language itself becomes more lyric and lush.

As a postscript, let me quote a small poem, “Freshet,” in its entirety from the book’s final section.

Born when the mountain rushes

with sudden, small streams,

when coltsfoot shoves its hooves—

thick-stemmed, fringed suns—

up through dead leaves,

and the sumac’s maroon torches

finally fade, Love, leave

your desk, come to the woods

where all is urge and bird-flurry

yearning toward sky. (63)