Diane Mehta, Tiny Extravaganzas: poems

 

HEDGE MAN

The gardener climbs a ladder, wiring floodlights
in to snip the darkness off and save us.
We think we are so rich, below hedges
trimmed; we believe in Galileo because we telescope
objects of desire and confirm their centrality.

We have lived here since the fourteenth century
We are kings of pencil shavings and paper
gaming high designs; we word-build
in Scrabble and weep over apocalypse letters
that won’t weave mechaniv into E or zock in O.

The floodlights swallow all the stars
we loved so much, but made within its shimmer
spotlights of our faces, dissolving behind us
with words and shapes we made at our tables,
knowledge in hand, believing we are so rich.

I was curious about Tiny Extravaganzas: poems (Medford MA: Arrowsmith Press, 2023), the first I’ve seen from poet Diane Mehta [see her 2019 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], a writer “born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay and New Jersey, studied in Boston, and now makes her home in New York City.” Tiny Extravaganzas is Mehta’s second published full-length collection, following Forest with Castanets (Four Way Books, 2019), as well as a poetics and style guide, How to Write Poetry (Barnes & Noble Books, 2005) and the essay collection Happier Far (University of Georgia Press, 2025). I’m intrigued by the expansiveness of Mehta’s American lyric, one that both cites and responds to Walt Whitman and his opening of lyric structure, as well as her engagement with the ode, triolets, hymns, landscape descriptions and objects of worship. “We lived in adverbs,” the poem “ODE TO PATRICK KEARNS, FUNERAL DIRECTOR / OF THE LEO F. KEARNS FUNERAL HOME IN QUEENS” writes, “dressed for rainshine / half the time and not according to the daily toll, not this running / tally, at scale in every borough. Our minds are lost to gravity / again. By gravity we live.” Mehta’s is a pretty expansive canvas, leaning hard into traditional lyric forms and influence, seeking answers through narrative suites of meditative flight. ‘On the black stone edge of a medieval bridge inviting you to jump,” she writes, opening the poem “PRAYER,” “miniature lights trail on the tails of frenzied gnats: / transmutations of fireflies pinwheeling in confusion. / What have I become, they think.” She writes a lyric that articulates even as it unfolds, unfurls, each poem a combination of short scene and lyric essay. Or, as the short poem “NOTHING DOING” ends: “Art diagrams the measure of all we find.”