HOW THE GARDEN LOOKS FROM HERE
by
Lisa Zimmerman
Snake Nation Press
Paper, 73 pages, $14
ISBN 0-9754843-2-X
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
Accessible poetry, clear and clean, and saying something new, is an art not easily achieved. For this kind of contemporary poetry, it is difficult to move beyond the work of Ted Kooser and Mary Oliver, though Lisa Zimmerman could join them. How The Garden Looks From Here puts the extraordinary in the ordinary, the song in the patience of a mother s love for a child, the wonder in a moment wound into fine memory. She is not fooled by life s deceptions, not taken in by what she is not, and yet there remains a natural quality to her poetry that perhaps only a woman and mother might know. This from Marketplace:
The
women share the baby between them
like
a ripe fruit. Outside a man is shouting.
All
around us the children play and laugh
and
grow up suddenly
right
in the middle of our lives.
Children, ripe fruit, a view into a garden we can t quite reach but somehow instinctively know, even if we can only sense it for a while. What Lisa Zimmerman does is sense it and see it more than most of us. In One of the First Summers, she writes of drought, the green in our garden becoming baked and brittle leaves.
But
the baby tumbled inside
and
I grew taut as a melon.
In
spite of drought
and
all the seeds that never germinated
a
world trembled into being.
In Night Light, there are ancestors, the great grandmothers who lean on counters, talking softly among themselves, from whom she learns how light spreads its fingers and how her boy, heavy with sleep in her arms, is unafraid when he wakes. This light, this connection with the past, present, and future, is luminous. The words move within us and remind us, gently, of what we should know intuitively, what we should remember, what we should never forget. Here, even in despair, there is hope. In Miscarriage she writes:
At
home you lower your body
like
worn cloth, into the bath.
Nothing
marks the wound
as
night drapes the house
and
sheep slumber in the field
across
the road.
But
a girl is there
moving
among them
and
her name leaps like a small fish
in
your dream, a single candle
in
the dark. )
Blake, the English poet from the 18th Century, tried to define a higher innocence and pointed to children playing as an example of heaven. Whatever he may have written, he did not take it to Zimmerman s level. In Singing, she tells the story of her grandmother hushing the singing of her mother, then a child; and the sad doctor quietly saying, in the depths of the Great Depression, Never tell a child to stop singing.
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