About book Original Fire: Selected And New Poems (2004)
Confession: I'm a fussy poetry reader, preferring collected poems to their selected counterparts. My theory is that if they're good I'd rather read a bunch of them than a cherry-picked few before moving on to another handful carefully selected by someone whose taste may be very different from mine. This selection, though, begins stunningly with the eponymous piece from 1984's Jacklight, and then "The Woods." Erdrich beckons to us from within their depths, her eyes flashing:At one time your touches were clothing enough.Within these trees now I am different.Now I wear the woods.I lower a headdress of bent sticks and secure it.I strap to myself a breastplate of clawed, roped bark.I fit the broad leaves of sugar maplesto my hands, like mittens of blood.Now when I say come,and you enter the woods,hunting some creature like the woman I was,I surround you.Light bleeds from the clearing. Roots rise.Fluted molds burn blue in the falling light,and you also knowthe loneliness that you taught me with your body.When you lie down in the grave of a slashed tree,I cover you, as I always did.Only this time you do not leave.These are powerful, haunting poems, inhabiting and inhabited by nature: less articulate than fiercely articulated, forceful. "The Strange People," which takes the inscrutable dark-eyed gaze of antelopes as its subject, staggered me with this deft transition:All day, asleep in clean grasses,I dream of the one who could really wound me.Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.Not even with his goodness.If I man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.I swear I would never leave him.But it's hard when the high points appear early, raising expectations that wait page after page for fulfillment. Long stretches of Original Fire failed to ignite in my mind, something soft and porous mistaken for flint. The Potchikoo stories made me smile and occasionally wince, but didn't stick. By contrast, "The Butcher's Wife," another segment from Baptism of Desire, grabbed hold of my attention immediately and continued to hold it with strong imagery, unexpected twists and connections: But something queer happens when the heart is delivered.When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger.You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there.[...]Butch once remarked there was no one so deftas my Otto. So true, there is great tact involvedin parting the flesh from the bones that it loves.How we cling to the bones.Something about "The Carmelites," from this sequence, both delights and frightens me. Perhaps it's the distance between us. I've thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night,scarred like the moon in her observance,shaved and bound and bandagedin rough blankets like a poor mare's carcass,muttering for courage at the very hourcups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Ottoturns to me with urgency and power.Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statuesmothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes,and the buried structure shows,the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs,freeze to acid in the strange heart.I last read Erdrich as a teenager and am struck by the kinship between her novels and these storytelling poems. It seems to me she is at her best when the words seem to flood out of her, a kind of predestined presentiment: she and they share a conviction in their truth, their rightness. There's a beauty to her language that belies her language (see "Advice to Myself") and I wish the whole book felt like this. But it is, after all, a selection, and a pretty good one at that, because it introduced me to "Clouds." I can't resist closing with the second half of this exquisite, meandering, drunken poem. What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?With a headful of spirits,how else can I think?Under so many clouds,such hooded and brokenold things. They go onsimply folding, unfolding, like sheetshung to dry and forgotten.And no matter how careful I watch them,they take a new shape,escaping my concentrations,they slip and disperseand extinguish themselves.They melt before I half unfathom their forms.Just as fast, a few bonesdisconnecting beneath us.It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.Not in this language.Not in this life.I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.But these clouds, creeping toward useach night while the milkgets scorched in the pan,great soaked loaves of breadare squandering themselves in the west.Look at them: Proud, unpausing.Open and growing, we cannot destroy themor stop them from movingdown each avenue,the dogs turn on their chains,children feel through the windows.What else should we feel our way through —We lay our streets overthe deepest cries of the earthand wonder why everything comes down to this:The days pile and pile.The bones are too fewand too foreign to know.Mary, you do not belong here at all.Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.Let everything be how it could have been, once:a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.But this is the way people are.All that appears to us empty,We fill.What is endless and simple,We carve, and initial,and narrowroads plow through the last of the hillswhere our gravestones rear smallblack vigilant domes.Our friends, our family, the dead of our warsdeep in this strange earthwe want to call ours.
Lately, I have been reading poetry. It sounds crazy, I know but poetry was my first love. I loved poetry before I knew I liked to read. I wrote poetry before I knew that I liked to write. Then I went to college and quit reading and writing poetry. Fast forward 20 years and poetry has popped back into my life in a new and significant way. Louise Erdrich is a writer on fire and her poems in this volume, Original Fire, are amazing. Poetry speaks to each reader differently. Some poems seemingly have no effect and others knock your socks off. Many of the poems in Original Fire knocked my socks off and made me think and made me say Wow. This collection of poems was a combination of some of her poems from two previous volumes of poetry with about 20 new poems not previously published added in. The poems are broken into five sections titled, Jacklight, The Potchikoo Stories, The Butcher's Wife, The Seven Sleepers and Original Fire. I started reading a poem or two a day this fall and I look forward to my stolen moments with a poem. It was especially hard to only read one or two of Erdrich's poems. I was compelled to keep turning the pages but I wanted to savor them and so I read them slowly to give my mind time to process them before I moved on. The ending two sections of Original Fire are my favorite and the poems packed a powerful punch. I loved the Buffalo Prayer, Advice to Myself, The Seven Sleepers, The Sacraments and many others. Here is the beginning of The SacramentsI. BaptismAs the sun dancers, in their helmets of sage,Stopped at the sun's apogeeand stood in the waterless light,so, after loss, it came to this:that for each year the being was destroyed,I was to sacrifice a piece of my flesh.The keen knife hoveredand the skin flicked in the bowl.Then the sun, the life that consumes us,burst into agony.Have you read any poetry lately??
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