Bedtime Tales, Upheavals, and Ecopoetry: Seven New Poetry Collections to Read This October

The late Helen Vendler wrote that, in poetry, thinking “issues not in axioms, but in pictures of the human mind at work, recalling, evaluating and structuring experience.” We grasp these thoughts not through paraphrase but by “participating in the process they unfold.” The “pictures” aren’t necessarily images but a reflection in words of the cognitive contours that led to the “discoveries of the poem—psychological, linguistic, historical, philosophical.”

These contours can arise from the way the fragmentation and upheaval of poetic tradition can project an intelligent outsider’s paradoxical response, a kind of connection-within-alienation, as in the poems of Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, or the way in which a pre-modern etymology summons a tradition of natural landscapes that both celebrates a primordial connection with nature and ironically laments our current losses, as in the poems by the English poet Matthew Hollis.

The creative consciousness of other artists that the fine translator, Idra Novey, has captured in her translations enters her own poetry in a collaboration with a visual artist whose work complements her own lyrical self-expression. I hear a sweet, oneiric murmur of poetic thought in the way the overarching form that Jordan Windholz has chosen, a variation on the bedtime story, expresses a father’s love for his daughters.

For Jimin Seo, there’s also poetic counterpoint in the way he situates his poetry in dualities of languages, cultures, and generations. He closes his book with a “translator’s preface” and yet the Korean versions of his poems aren’t clearly translations but primary imaginings within a different language and culture. As with Novey, translation itself may be Seo’s version of mind: “It’s backwards whatever we have to say,” a source that isn’t only a source but a pouring in reverse from an ocean of thought (“memory / migrate // translate / memory”).

When Jennifer Chang speaks of a prodigal’s hometown as something the speaker has “lost all fluency in,” she captures a way of thinking that defines itself not by thought itself but by what a mind can no longer think about, in this case, the childhood home that she was once immersed in fluently, like a language. “The thought has passed / before thinking found / a wellspring,” she writes, not because there was never a generous flow of experience there but because, once the home was lost, something became irrevocably uncertain about the place itself. Thinking, for her, depends on what we remain connected with and therefore on what is misplaced and rejected as well.

With a similar focus on absence, Janice N. Harrington views the fanciful decorations that Black women created in their midwestern yards as the expression of minds that suffered through the oppression that led to the Great Migration, with all the expenditures of thought, of “trouble and death,” that it took to reach their place of freedom.

“A yard? Because a body needs to stop sometime,” she writes. In their homely beauty, the yards display something paradoxical, not more thought, but the goal, the end, of thought, the anxious mind stilled into the bliss of arrival at its hard-won freedom, because a “mind surrounded by beauty is a mind at rest.”

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Jennifer Chang, An Authentic Life

To achieve an authentic life, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that we cannot be alone. A person’s own freedom lay in “seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others,” and “no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.”

Jennifer Chang’s beautifully meditative third collection knows the necessity of a wounding aloneness in the creation of poetry (“I wrote / no poems then, though I opened wounds / every day”), but the search for something “authentic,” however ironic or disillusioned the intention, resides in the imperfect freedoms we grant others and those they grant ourselves: “Once I watched others ride, / and now I was riding.”

Like the brooding presence of the strange man who crouches in a corner of the municipal pool where the speaker’s child is learning to swim, the otherness of others, their flaws and submerged violence, mediates against “authenticity.” A difficult immigrant family, preoccupied with the hard work of “being American,” teaches the dubious lesson that there is no room in the imagination for pleasure. The end of marriage is a sundering of de Beauvoir’s dicta with a painful, Garboesque pronouncement: “I want to be alone / I said to my first husband.”

If an authentic life may feel inconceivable when the speaker finds herself in a hospital after trying to commit suicide (“Vicodin, Percocet, poisoned anapests”), Chang shows how even in extremis authenticity resides in what we make of others, like the patient in the next bed, also an attempted suicide, whose otherness is a salve: “I loved her voice, the steely surety of each word. / I loved her voice for not being mine.”

From such depths the poetry rises to the freedom that a mother grants her children, which lies in the wisdom of knowing to accept the cycles of self and other, like the sustaining ebb and flow of rain. What is especially beguiling about Chang’s work is the persuasive fluency of its moral trajectories, disillusioned yet also connected to others: “my children you must love / in kind the world the people / you must kindly love / the rain eroding another / weekend the flowerless / late fall hickory bark and / acres of treefall and then love / the rain not coming at all.”

Janice N. Harrington, Yard Show

In Janice N. Harrington’s magnificent fourth collection, the Great Migration was “disruption, / or pattern recognition, jump down turn around,” and the patterns that the migrants recognized in their new homes relied on the risk-taking attention that “makes belonging, makes place.” At their midwestern destinations, this sense of belonging often manifested itself in the “yard show,” where the decorative bric-a-brac of everyday life, “plaster ducks and plastic hens,” “wrought-iron filigree and sconces,” turned the spaces around a house into a form of personal expression.

Through these decorations, those who escaped the Jim Crow South created extravagant paeans to their newfound sense of home and liberty, “Black Versailles, Black baroque: ado, outdo, / and overdone.” With vigilant detailing and historical discernment, Harrington uncovers the “genius loci, hierophany, sanctum” in these Illinois homes and landscapes, refusing the superficial urge to see the yard show as merely kitschy or déclassé.

She searches for a way of “retelling / the stories that streets tell,” where broken things are “redeemed, reused, repurposed, / nothing abandoned,” and turned into something of personal and symbolic importance: “This Black woman— / pleasing no one but herself.”

Harrington’s style possesses a spiritually centered equilibrium—neither too spare nor convoluted, too outraged nor recessive—that becomes a beautifully artful version of prayerful yet disillusioned attention. Gazing on the prairie, she sees a vision of her and her progenitors’ place within it (“all the darkened progenies of grass / that reach and strive and shape dissent from light”), while in a domestic scene from childhood, she motions to an even larger compass, of Eve and the original sins within human nature, where love is like “the slow art of apple peeling—requiring attention, a sharp edge, a wound, a revelation, and a falling away.”

Matthew Hollis, Earth House 

A couple on a walk by the sea accidentally rout a field mouse into the path of a harrier, who turns its prey into “a red sock inside out.” “Sometimes our trouble is being there,” the speaker says. “Better without us all of this life.”

If what has become known as ecopoetry emerged from the spiritual desolation that has followed from the destruction of the environment and the increasing certainty of catastrophe, Hollis, an English poet whose second collection arrives nearly two decades after his acclaimed first, finds ironic correlates for the loss of nature in his textured witness to the remaining abundance of the countryside in Britain and Ireland and in the richness of the archaic diction and etymological wellsprings of the language he uses to describe it.

“Descending from the tarn that day,” he writes, “I felt sure that we knew happiness, / and reached into the waters of the gill / for something to give you,” at the same magical moment that his loved one gives him the same gift, a small red stone.

“Tarn” and “gill,” from the Old Norse words for a mountain lake and a ravine, provide a local measure of eons traversed, as do the “guises of the hare we knew: / bandy, salley, sukey, sue,” elements of diction and cadence that evoke a descent of nature poetry from Heaney, Auden, Wordsworth, and Clare back to the mortal fens of the Old English “Wulf and Eadwacer.”

And yet the mastery of language is worn lightly, luminously, as part of the processes of life—the names of the hare are words the speaker teaches to a five-year-old—so that what Hollis bestows is a panoptic view of the “house” that the earth just barely remains, spanning the measures of our ignorance and destruction from cosmic heights as well as the level of a flower: “Further still, the curve of the earth / is unmissable; why ever did they think it flat? / In shore, butterflies bloom from the aster. / I thought there would be more time.”

Idra Novey, Soon and Wholly

While outdoors with her children, the speaker steps into a mound of leaves and finds her foot stuck in “the rotting chest wall of a dead deer.” “Until my ankle was trapped in those ribs,” she says, “I hadn’t considered how the unknowable might get hold of me.”

Like her translations of the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector and the Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Idra Novey’s third full-length collection renders variations of the unknowable—the phenomenology of a dire illness, the estrangement of being a woman, the loving otherness of children and literature—into the sacral embodiments of art: “If there’s a temple beyond glands and bone / for all that goes blank in a lifetime, maybe it resides in the body / of a poem.”

If I hear Lispector in a cool, fuguelike awareness of the self’s movement through an alien world, and Abdolmalekian in the clarity of the throughline towards and away from moral desolation, Novey brings her own world into focus here, with a subtly lyrical directness that motions from the personal to the mortal to the global. Observing a fire she and her family build while visiting a friend’s farm, she writes, “We poked the flames with our misspoken words and cancer scares, with our dread for the whole heating earth.”

A grim upbringing in a northeastern reach of the Appalachians is sketched fleetly, with the speaker’s complicity borne lightly but decisively in the pronoun “us”: “The classmate spitting tobacco into his library book, the one setting fire to the gas-soaked nest of a bird, didn’t they add us all up to less?” How we carry ourselves with others, whether family or those with whom we collaborate (the work of the artist Erica Baum inspires two longer poems here), is a central task of the book. “We were close / as cognates once,” she writes of someone named “J,” “nearly holy / to one another.”

This task of collaboration and connection renders the inevitable, cradle-to-grave alienation of human aloneness even starker and more affecting, as in the hospital poem that closes the book, where the “agonizing sounds” of a woman’s dying mother lead her to calm herself with a natural vision of home: “She remembered thinking quiet, the word forest surfacing and then something snapping inside her like a twig, a clean break — and she’d done it, delivered herself from that horrible, mechanized bed into the dense woods where she was born.”

Jimin Seo, OSSIA

If Richard Howard’s archly baroque variations of dramatic monologue turned a Victorian form into a twentieth-century mode of poetic consciousness, Jimin Seo’s debut collection is a captivating recombination of divergent voices into a more fractured and astringent depiction of a twenty-first century sensibility.

We hear a Korean immigrant mother’s torment (“a bad life / is a bad marriage is a bad wife”), a queer Asian boy’s anomie among what he terms in Korean the “pink-clad” ghosts (“all I touch yellows,” he says in English), and Howard himself (1929-2022), the speaker’s dear friend and mentor, dying of Lewy body dementia, whose characteristic style—elegant, allusive, occasionally camp—is filtered through the more brazen demotic of our era: “Adonis dressed in my golden past as I buy / stock in each of my well-endowed wounds. / I have lost more of my hair, and my body / brags longevity by my cock’s mere pissing.”

Korean versions of the poems follow the inner line of their own traceries, while English versions woven among them proceed in shadow wellspring and revision. If a phrase from the Korean speaks of a son who builds his mother’s body with poetry and asks why he rebuilds her again in this land, the facing English page omits the mother in favor of an invocation that portrays what familial assimilation feels like from the inside: “A Venus of / Migration, let me slant my neck to the half- / lit chandelier and imagine my own family at / the table.”

The tribute to a feted poet whose erudite mind now lies wasted with affliction and age is especially poignant for the forthright yet nimble way that Seo reaches out to his friend by traversing the often-irreconcilable worlds that form his own sensibility: Korea and the United States, racial and cultural identities, the proto-gay culture of Howard’s generation that propagated Seo’s queer world today.

Howard’s room, decorated in red, isn’t so much immortalized with poetic art as made beautifully frangible, like the work of a glass blower: “Richard, I give up my fiction and the language you speak / gone from your body / is my body’s fiction and the hours I visit your body / in your red room / is the empty room of your mind is a fiction I blow / my life into a red glass.”

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Purchase

A certain style of poetry, often slender or compressed, concatenates offbeat phrases that muster a thrilling angularity of meaning along some stark, cognitive edge. Emily Dickinson, John Keene, Jean Valentine, and Anne Carson are some practitioners.

In Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s third collection, the phrases turn on emotions unbidden and unrepressed yet only certainly known in the act of writing: “in a book, in the bath, in a clawfoot tub, claw-hammering / a past, moment in a current, set afloat on the edge / of insight, of an uncooperative vision— / a blackbody wrapped in a white towel, / anxious / to reveal then abandon…/ In unison: Can you tell me how to get back to the sentence so I can serve it?”

These poems straddle and combine polarities of love and aloneness, of health and illness (an aneurysm’s bulge like “a series of questions”), of blackness as a physical and mental quality (a Black woman’s application of makeup in a mirror whose melancholy reflection is the “excellence” that “gives blackness back”), and of dream states and waking: how rising from slumber shifts a dream horror (“nothing-stared hooded droop with pupil lift”) to “What sweetness / another state is—stealing from her.”

In a lovely riff on both Christopher Smart and “Pied Beauty,” Van Clief-Stefanon reaches towards the numinous: “For the topographic map in buttercream-—: / For the grey marble with a shadow inside—: / For the amber safe holding the black legs of a mystery-—: / For the perforated golden honey drop coral-—: / I will not ask permission; I will praise God.”

Jordan Windholz, The Sisters

When a father tells a bedtime story to his young daughters, he may be offering moral lessons and cautionary tales (“Fate is nothing but what comes next”), staving off fears of the outer world by purging them through fairy-tale violence (“they did not find a bit of him, not one of his shoes”), or simply opening a portal into dreams (“They fall asleep under the stars, which are meaningless, if beautiful”).

Jordan Windholz’s second book, a collection of prose poems about the two sisters of the title, offers elegant, poetic tales that echo aspects of the bedtime story but end up on the other side of Aesop and Grimm, in the imaginative spaces reserved for grown-up poets with a taste for Calvino and Pessoa, who search for “new words to lend patina to pallor.”

What is moving and surprising is the way the book itself acts as an embodiment of a parent’s love even as it avoids autobiography, the use of the lyrical I, and any sentimental effusions. Because it is an offshoot of the bedtime story, it reads not only as a carefully wrought outpouring of this love but as an album of a father’s imagination, his angst and anticipation, for when his daughters are safely beyond the impediments of childhood and have fixed the future “into something firm, something like the ground below their feet upon which they twirled, eyes to the heavens, eyes to a night evacuating its light for whoever cared to look.”

By pondering the paths his children might embark upon, Windholz turns lyrical poetry into a tool for wisdom and the elusion of mortal and moral dangers, permitting multiple permutations in its vision of the children’s future lives, as he pictures the sisters, his daughters, as “captains of industry” or “figures in a Hockney painting” or “the last page of a book” or divers tiptoeing to “the edges of trenches,” peering “deep into the abyssal breach, into the dark-seeing eyes of sea goblins.”