Dolefully, a Rampart Stands

Dolefully, a Rampart Stands by Paige Ackerson-Kiely (2019)

I was drawn to this book of poetry when I read that it was set in the rural Northeast. According to the description the poems are about "isolation, captivity, and vanishing." I can't ever get past the words of poetry to find the themes so I can't really talk about what I'm supposed to get out of this collection, I can only talk about my own response.

I was struck by the language of these poems, and by the unusual form of some of them. One of the earliest poems in the book, "The Lesson," is written like a prose paragraph. I didn't expect this, nor did I expect later another poem written in the same style that extended for 20 pages, one solid paragraph on each page. It's described in reviews as having a noir style which isn't how I would have thought to describe it, but I suppose it's apt. It's called "Book About a Candle Burning In a Shed" and it's about the investigation of the murder of a young woman. The narrator maybe be a police officer, and I alternately thought he was and was not the murdered woman's ex-boyfriend. I kept getting confused on that point. Although this poem went on a bit long for me and I couldn't quite make sense of it, I really liked the narrative voice.

Other poems written in a more traditional style stood out to me because of their vivid and unexpected imagery. Here's a bit I like from "Shine":

The stars do not eat my breakfast.
A man eats my breakfast. Like the stars
he cannot take care of me very well.
But oh does he burn.

I don't know why I like that so much, but I do.

"The Rose Bush" might be my favorite. I want to quote it in full, but will just share this part:

Dieback all the way back
before you were born ugly 
in the cradle, pretty at the table.

Something about that sounds like a song, the whole poem does, and I want to keep reading it over and over. It appears fairly early in the collection and I think it was here that it all began to feel somehow familiar. When I was in high school I wrote poetry - not terrible poetry either, poetry filled with sharp images and words that just sounded satisfying when you put them together. Had I continued to write poetry, I'm convinced it would have been a lot like some of the poetry in this book. What a strange response to reading someone else's book, but there it is.

I want to just continue through the collection, quoting all my favorite passages here, but I'd be here all night re-reading the entire thing. Suffice it to say that I'm very glad I picked up this book. For a while there I was trying out various recently-published books of poetry and not really finding anything I loved so I almost cancelled my library request for this one, only changing my mind at the last minute.

I may come back to it again sometime, and I may seek out another of her books. One of them is titled My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer and I can't imagine anything with that title wouldn't be good.

Some poetry

I'm trying to read more poetry and in fact one of my goals this year is to find a new (to me) poem that I love every month. It turns out that maybe "love" is too strong of a word, but my criteria is basically a poem that I want to come back to and read again and again. It also turns out that I have to read a whole lot of poetry to find a poem like that, so this may be more of a two-month experiment than a year-long project. Mostly I've been sampling poems here and there, but here are three collections that I read in their entirety.

Memory of the Future by Elizabeth Spires (2018)

I saw a review of this one which said it's supposed to be sort of Zen, or inspired by Zen thought, and the snippets I read in the review intrigued me. The first poem in it is my first "new favorite" of the year. It's called "Pome" and compares poems to fruit.

O I remember days....
Climbing the branches of a tree
ripe and heavy with pomes. 

As with any collection, there were some I didn't feel like I really got, some which I liked but didn't stand out, and few favorites. In addition to "Pome," there were a couple others that I read several times. One was called "House of String" and another "Snow, the Novel" which I very appropriately happened to read during a winter storm.

When I think about the collection as a whole the descriptors that come to mind are easy, quiet contemplation. Easy in that it feels unforced and the words flow well. Spires tends to focus on little things rather than grandiose proclamations about universal themes. The poems feel immediate, like she is talking about what is right in front of her, but those little things are very important.

100 Best Poems of All Time edited by Leslie Pockell (2001)

I would argue that these are not, in fact, the best 100 poems of all time. In fact, I'd argue that they aren't even all poems, since some of them are actually songs. I didn't read every word of every poem. If one was especially long and I wasn't enjoying it, I didn't make myself finish. If it was a song that I know by heart, I didn't bother reading it at all. (Which I shouldn't have to because although songs are similar to poems, they are not poems.) But I read most of them so I think it counts.

The editor didn't include more than one poem by any poet, so on the one hand I can't see how it's a definitive "100 best" list unless it just happens that the 100 best are all by different poets. On the other hand, I appreciate the breadth and variety that resulted.

The poems I liked most from the collection and which were new to me (as far as I can remember) are "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson and "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg. The collection also contains "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath and "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou which I was already familiar with and still like a lot.

Dark Woods by Richard Sanger (2018)

I think the review I read of this one mentioned nature and vivid imagery and those sounded appealing. It turned out to probably be my favorite of the three. I really like poetry with vivid, surprising descriptions, so when one of the first poems in this book describes an artichoke as "tight-lipped and celibate, nodding your bald pate wisely at the rumor of pleasures you shall never taste" I was pretty sure I was going to like this book.

My favorite might be "Merrily Down the Stream," which compares lives to traveling by water, with occasional interjections like "just look at that cliff, will you" but then progresses on to "our bright vessel banged up against the rock you never saw, dimwit" and accusing "you always do this" before ending with "all our needs and secrets spilling forth, for Christ's sake, in the rapids, and the wreck, the wreck of our lives."

Others I liked a lot include "Herons on Ice," "Different Pears," "Adulterous Mannequins," and "Cornstalks." There's definitely a pattern: most of the poems I liked the most tended to be about everyday things (artichokes, herons, pears, etc) but looked at from a new perspective. I'm kind of simple when it comes to poetry, because often when it tackles larger, more abstract subjects, I just don't always get it. There were some in this collection, too, that I think I'd maybe need to read a few times to understand more fully. But mostly, I liked it the first time through, though I re-read the ones I liked most anyhow just for the enjoyment of it.

Milk and Honey

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur (2014)

This collection of poetry touches on themes of love, loss, abuse, and survival. It's divided into four sections, "the hurting," "the loving," "the breaking," and "the healing." Most of the poems are quite short - some only three or four lines - and they are accompanied by simple, but expressive, line drawings.

These verses are simple in that you don't need to puzzle over every line to try and figure out what the poet is getting it, and I appreciated that. At times this meant that I breezed through without thinking about them much at all since they're so obvious in meaning, but at other times I dwelled on a poem or its accompanying drawing. Many of these poems could easily be the sort of anguished poetry you write in high school and are later completely embarrassed by (not that I'd know, of course) but it never quite crosses that line. Perhaps the level of maturity and insight is enough to take it out of the realm of cliche while remaining in a spot that is very recognizable to other humans.

I have a hard time writing about poetry, so I'll share a couple of the short poems here for you to get a taste.

One of my favorite illustrations

i know i
should crumble
for better reasons
but have you seen
that boy he brings
the sun to its
knees every night

and this one:

for you to see beauty here
does not mean
there is beauty in me
it means there is beauty rooted
so deep within you
you can't help but
see it everywhere


Published on Createspace in 2014, the volume is currently experiencing a surge in popularity, though I'm not sure why this has happened after so much time. I heard about it from a coworker who shared a few snippets online, and it looked like the sort of poetry I could get into, or at least understand. It's not for everyone though, that's for sure. The Goodreads reviews are all over the place, and some reviewers hate this collection with a vehemence that is a bit surprising. Some say it's not even poetry because the form is so loose, which is a very odd criticism to me. I mean, if poetry can't be loose and creative, what can? I think poetry is the sort of thing that is very individual and personal; a particular poem or style of poetry either speaks to you or it doesn't.

For me, the experience of reading this book was a bit uneven. I was quite drawn to some of the poems; others, not so much. And that's fine. I really enjoyed the drawings though, and in some cases, the particular combination of verse and illustration. I'm glad that I picked it up.

Black Aperture

Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen (2013)

Rasmussen's debut poetry collection centers on his brother's suicide and its aftermath. Meditations on the act itself, the pain of his brother's voice still on the answering machine, and the way the author now views the world through the lens of the tragedy make up this slim but powerful volume which was a finalist for the National Book Award this year.

I'm not really qualified to remark on poetry, since I've spent little time reading it in the last 15 years or so. Back when I did read poetry, I concentrated pretty heavily on Sylvia Plath with a little Anne Sexton and a couple others thrown in. But I wanted to try again. A year or so ago I tried reading Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars, which won the Pulitzer for Poetry in 2012, and though I could appreciate it on some level, it was mostly impenetrable and I abandoned it. I felt like she started with some ideas and thoughts she wanted to convey, then slathered them with a whole lot of words, requiring the reader to peel each poem like an onion to get at its core. Is that what poetry is supposed to be? Why not just say what you want to say in a way that is poetic, without completely obscuring it?

That, fortunately, is what Matt Rasmussen does as far as I can tell. I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing that could be grasped by someone more proficient than I am at reading poetry, but the point is that I don't feel like I'm missing anything. Reading these poems, I felt like I could understand enough to make it worthwhile and even pleasurable, though I hesitate to use such a word about poems on such a traumatic subject.

All were written as a series of non-rhyming couplets - I don't know if this is significant, or if it is usual to write a collection all in one style. But because of this style, with its frequent spacing, the poems felt less dense while still heavy with meaning. Rasmussen's language was clear, vivid, and darkly beautiful.

Here are some passages I especially liked.

From "O":

"At the base
of each bare tree

someone has spilled
a bucket of shadow."

From "Phone":

"But together we decide
which way the dream goes

like spilled water on a table
we carry across the room."

"The Orange Leaves" begins

"rocked back and forth
through the air
as if someone was

scraping the rust
off the sunset."

But of course you need to read the poems in their entirety to really appreciate them, especially the short ones like "Monet as a Verb," which is also a really fantastic title. Other poems had really great titles too, like "In Whoever's Hotel Room this Is" and "We're Not the Stars, We're What's Between Them."

Two poems were about his brothers hands, which I found quite intriguing though I'm unsure of the significance. They were both in the second section of the book, "Elegy in X Parts." The narrator talks about the hands being delivered with the mail, and putting them away somewhere only to have them appears in various places unexpectedly. It was a little creepy, in the best possible way.

This was a lucky pick I think, because it just happens to be the kind of poetry I like. Dark, vivid, and just accessible enough for someone like me to read. They definitely benefit from rereading and the more I do, the more I like them. Good poems beg to read over and over again, to wring any last bits of insight from them and consequently, I'm reluctant to return this book to the library.