As with other poems discussed this month, what really draws me in is its intimate, compassionate tone and the speaker’s wise but also vulnerable voice. She communicates authority without arrogance and counsel without pedantry so that when I read the poem I feel understood, nourished and supported.
But “it” may instead refer to a potential relationship, an entanglement with the woman the speaker is daydreaming about in the tub and her delicious discovery in lines 10-12, that “it’s only love, and love is like water / unencumbered by ‘he’ or ‘she.’” We are left in the end in a tantalizing state of unknowing, but one in which the woman speaker has agency and is joyous and free.
The images in “Earth and Sky” are rendered with skill, precision, and imagination. [S]o what we see is not just a static postcard but something alive as the world and just as subject to continuous shift and change.
The poem film is a new art form, and in its innovation and passion this one pays wonderful homage to the man whose work inspired Gelfand’s poem.
Everything anyone could want in a love poem—sensuality, depth, tenderness, appreciation, frank passion, and cleaving—it’s all here in one stanza of 35 free-verse lines in which a speaker addresses her lover with frank and joyous desire.
Because the lines in the poem are all of roughly equal length, each section looks like a column or chimney, with the stacks getting shorter as the poem proceeds, so that the poem is also held together visually on the page.
How do we, who have never known this kind of war and devastation respond to suffering like this? Everything we have to offer, including the language we offer it in, is of us, tainted by a perspective that cannot empathize with the plight of war refugees like this student.
The continuity of personal history and our ability to access it through memory and creativity are Susan Kolodny’s central concerns. How do we unspool the narrative of our lives? And what are the risks and rewards of doing this?
Before the poem even begins, the title reveals two of its central preoccupations—the “father,” and loss (“used to”).
We see details of the decorous, eminently civilized inner space of the room occupied by the human “half” of the Fox Woman and her child; we see the child and feel his longing for his mother. We also see, in perhaps a way even deeper than is communicated by the art, the terrible urgency that compels the Fox Woman over the literal threshold, away from woman-, wife-, and motherhood and into wildness.
Fear about a parent’s mortality is universal, lurking beneath the surface of most of our lives; in “Going Under,” the fear draws nigh and reveals a triangle fin.