One thing I’m not doing
in my poems: reporting
on anything that really
happened.
When I say I’m from New
York, Glaswegians say, “Oh, I love Woody Allen.” They cannot construe how large
a state can be. I just happen to actually be from Manhattan. (“The
Ungovernable”)
Albany, New York poet, editor and publisher Rebecca Wolff’s fourth poetry collection is
One Morning—. (Wave Books, 2015),
following her collections Manderley (University
of Illinois Press, 2001), Figment
(W.W. Norton, 2004) and The King
(W.W. Norton, 2009). There seems something more open, and less constrained, in
the poems of this collection—something to do with the breath—compared to the
poems in her prior collection, a collection of poems on becoming and being a
mother. Perhaps “constrained” isn’t the right word—but there is certainly
something about the poems in this collection that is more open somehow, in the
movement of line and breath. There is something less formal and more
conversational, yet no less meticulously formed. As the poem “Palisades” opens:
“Interred in region // nothing super global in this locale // where I live,
where I / bought – // what would I tell you about it if I could?”
Structured
in six untitled sections, the poems in One
Morning—. are engaged with structures and politics, and governing bodies
and power (both real and perceived), delighting in odd flashes of wry humour
combined with a lack of patience for nonsense. Her poems sever and subvert,
shift and carve through the lyric without missing a beat or a step, composed without
a wasted word or gesture. As she writes in the poem “Fronting”: “And I trust
people // to make good choices / so I don’t have to impale them // on the tines
of my pitchfork.”
Irony
is the salt of life
(I’d
trade it in for gold)
Portaging takes a lot
of time
and that’s how we are
made
A morning’s worth of
contretemps
Japan has bigger tides
In sharing one finds
extra peace
and this is what I’ll
say:
“Oh, boil the cabbage
down, girls”
I’m on my way to work
At work I’ll find my
head’s in use
More mountainsides en
route
In view the smallest
leaf, you know
measured by a glyph
your daughter’s face
my daughter’s face
I really mean my
daughter’s face.
At
one hundred and forty pages, One
Morning—. has considerable weight, and the poems are incredibly sharp. There
is something curious about the way Wolff utilizes “confession,” such as the
poem/section “The Curious Life / and Mysterious Death / of Peter J. Perry.” She
utilizes personal information to explore a series of interrogations, and even
acknowledgments, to incredible degree, even as the fact of the information
being factual as hers, or anyone elses (there is the suggestion that the
narrator is related to Peter J. Perry, for example), becoming entirely beside
the point. Her poems confess, and yet, remain private; what she gives away is
far more valuable and far less tangible to track than whether or not a particular
morsel of information really happened, and in the ways in which she informs. She
is pointedly skilled at knowing exactly how and what to impart, and the reasons
why, allowing her poems an intimacy that is deeply felt, without the
distraction of the extraneous.
feeling it at the gas
pump
fumes unchained
– I will report you –
squad car drove up
my tailpipe
called my friend
in
to see what he could do
for us. (“Mad as Hell/Not Going to Take It”)
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