Women's Voices For Change

Sometimes, all a poem does or aspires to do is capture a moment. The moment can be large or small, one of emotion, inspiration, revelation, or just any ordinary experience that means something to the poet. In “Recuerdo,” it is a night of pleasure and (I assume) passion between two young lovers.

While the poems seem to sprawl across global spaces and national identities, at their core they are about the ordinary stuff—work, parenthood, health, aging, language, and as the title underlines, those arts that compose and console us daily—books, writing, wine.

A poem can be powerful and remain elusive and mysterious at the same time. In fact, many would argue that less accessible poems are more powerful than transparent ones. In this case, “The Path” is a mysterious poem, but one that also tells a clear story.

As with most successful poems about personal grief, this one dwells less on the particulars of this speaker’s loss than on something more universal: the nature of suffering and the utter inability of our carefully compiled rituals to dispel it. And also of the inevitable human impulse still to try.

I read today's poem as a postmodern "carpe diem" poem, one that dispenses with sexual politics and goes to the heart of the matter for human beings of all genders: Life does not last, and we would do well to learn to enjoy it as it is while we are still in it.

Cancer may have been what spurred Jane Underwood to begin writing again, but the poems transcend the specific circumstances of her illness to become a powerful meditation on mortality, the terminal illness that infects us all.

“Sieve” begins, as all good poems should, with an attention-grabbing first line, “Young men seem all edges,” and then ups the interest ante with two delightful and apt similes, “shoulders like shelves” and my favorite, “bellies like slides / to the most obvious / of pleasures.” That’s a sly, possibly punning allusion to sex, of course, and one I haven’t seen before but that feels just right.

An activist who championed Jewish identity and worked tirelessly to improve the lot of the poor, Emma Lazarus valued freedom and social justice and understood the importance of immigrants to this country’s future.