Three from California

by Kristen Rae Anderson and printed in Alehouse Review, No. 4 2010

 

American Fractal. Timothy Green. Red Hen, 2009.

Mom’s Canoe. Rebecca Foust. Texas Review, 2008.

Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths. Judy Kronenfeld. Litchfield Review, 2008.

 

      At the heart of three new books by California poets, different modes of perception reveal transformative powers. Timothy Green’s American Fractal presents a universe in which images reflect one another, in which parts speak for their whole in surprisingly significant ways. Judy Kronen­feld’s Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, focusing on small but consequential moments, summons the collective experi­ences of a lifetime, often in conversation with one another. And Rebecca Foust, in Mom’s Canoe, evokes the particular places and people of her past with brutal, tender, vivid details.

      Green’s title, American Fractal, suggests philosophical roots that play with narrative. In mathematics, a “fractal” is an often irregular object that resembles its original source—a paisley design in which one swirling paisley reflects another and another, or a set of triangles geometrically set in new patterns within a larger triangle. A fractal makes visible the western concept of the microcosm: a world within a world. Green’s poems reflect this concept, presenting visual, sonic, and semantic images that come from within and belong to (and perhaps spin from) other images. In “To Monte­video,” a former lover writes to the speaker: “We were the hollow space / a shell curls around.” In “Hiking Alone,” the speaker dreams of emerging from a night lost in a wilderness: “clapping for joy—however briefly—at all we / ever wanted: a little darkness to climb out of.” In these and other poems, images of something inside (in a shell, in a space of darkness) change one’s perception of what’s outside.

      Green’s collection employs various forms and poetic devices to expose the relationships of parts to wholes. For instance, poems utilize various types of rhyme—chief among them assonance and consonance—to draw concepts together. The first couplet of “The Sense of Being Looked At” illustrates: “Around the corner, footsteps. A heel / clicking stone. The slosh of loose gravel.” The concept continues into another couplet and then another—all focusing on small bits of sounds and silence. Even in this first couplet, we note the loosely slanted rhyme of heel and gravel, plus the near assonance of line 1’s corner and line 2’s stone, not to mention the eye-rhyme of footsteps and loose.

      A particular free-verse form shared by six poems throughout the collection appeals particularly well to its philosophical underpinning. With this form, Green justifies both right and left margins, yet the effect is different from that of a prose poem. Green’s form is more open, resulting in a line-broken poem without typical line breaks. Instead, space opens up between phrases. The first three lines of “Her Face Once” illustrate this technique:

 

imagine dusk a streetcar  your empty

window sheets of rain coating glass your

hand riddled with age peels back the

 

In this form, a poem’s later images mirror earlier images. For instance, the final line of “Her Face Once” reflects much of the first line: “a stranger on a streetcar at dusk.” Life is recursive, these poems tell the reader—and they show it as well.

      In Judy Kronenfeld’s Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, visual and auditory imagery conflates to suggest waning time. In the title itself, a reader can see the change of light on the wall of a room as the sun lowers in the sky, just as the musical reference emphasizes the lessening of a particular interval. In fact, the collection travels—with some digressions along the way—from childhood through marriage and motherhood to the aging and death of the speaker’s parents.

      What one may notice first about Kronenfeld’s poems is their sensitivity to sound. Throughout this collection of mostly free-verse poems, she makes effective use of assonance, as well as repetition, punctuation, and spacing to enhance rhythm. The haunting internal rhyme of two lines from “Waiting for the Poem” evoke this quality: “clouds move across the moon / to an absence of music.” These are lines worth repeating out loud for their sound-echoes. The poem “Heard Melodies” reflects on childhood piano lessons. The speaker, an adult, hears music she once played as a youth, and its resonance reminds her of “light / shifting in a room” or “the wash of evening / deepening to indigo outside.” The repeated short i of shift, in, indigo as well as the long e of evening and deepening rub up against the hard t and g sounds to offer the friction of transition: day into evening, youth into adulthood.

      Kronenfeld’s poems reveal the unexpected shifts and surprises one experiences in a lifetime: the turning of a corner, the surprise of something waiting in the next moment. Throughout these quietly reflective poems, change unsettles the reader as it does the speaker, and a sense of danger lurks—in the first mistake in each piano lesson; during a visit to the run-down street where the speaker grew up; with the expectation of death, first of one’s parents and then of one’s own. In the poem “After General Anaesthesia,” the speaker explains why she makes sounds as she wakes from an induced sleep. It’s not that she’s hurting, she says; instead, it’s her becoming aware “of the returned / body’s capacity” to feel both pain and pleasure, which the poem describes as “pain’s bright / flipped coin.” Through the craft of her poems, Kronenfeld brings the reader to turning points—only to wait. It’s a view from the edge of one’s seat.

      As Green’s book projects deep human emotions and experiences through a mathematical philosophy, and Kronenfeld’s rides on sound waves of images, dreams, and memory, Rebecca Foust’s Mom’s Canoe rows the reader along a once-pristine river now tarnished by the ravages of human indiscretions. Foust’s collection vividly evokes colors and textures of the Allegheny Mountain region of Pennsylvania, where the awe-inspiring mountains of the valley “usurp the sky,” as claimed in the opening poem, “Allegheny Mountain Bowl,” which goes on to explain how, for the out-of-work and winter-cold residents, “a hundred-year oak is two weeks’ cordwood.” Throughout these poems, the speaker reaches—as does the gardener in “Perennial”—into the cold winter soil “to find something born / of the decay of all that was young once, / something still growing and green.”

      Throughout, unforgettable figures illustrate joy and hardship and deep grief. There’s Casey in “The Bees Are Inside,” a childhood friend of the speaker—“Inbred they called him and worse, / and sometimes he heard them”—who jumps from a tree to his death. In “Things Burn Down,” the reader meets a grandmother who takes in other people’s laundry for money, while a multi-skilled grandfather lingers in a place where “there was no work.” The speaker’s father appears in many poems, in many moods: sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, or, in “The Dream,” in his last days, no longer dreaming of one day taking a cruise but simply hungering “just for anything not broken.” The speaker’s mother, too, figures prominently, portrayed as a practical, hard-working woman. And, of course, there’s her eponymous canoe, the symbol of her strength, grace, and care, and—as portrayed in the title poem—the vessel in which she “floated high, bow lifted, / arced up like flight, all magic, power.”

      Often found in these poems is the loneliness of a bird call into an echoing landscape. This sense of isolation, even desolation, is evident in the first poem, “Allegheny Mountain Bowl,” as the workers’ bootsteps cry out “laid off, laid off, the mines mined out / and the Railroad dead.” Readers remain still after moving through this collection of poems, feeling as if they’ve visited the place, met the people, and experienced the resonance. The final stanza of the last poem, “November,” sums up this mood. After recalling vivid colors of promise, “emerald” and “burnt gold,” the stanza shifts abruptly to “throat-catching / scarlet.” Foust’s powerful narrative details draw a reader’s attention to the harshness of this world and its people with loving sadness.

      As these three books demonstrate, a writer’s perspec­tive offers a lens through which to view experience. The world appears different through Green’s fractured, cubist-like perspective; or Kronenfeld’s lyrical moments and memories with their surprises and shifts; or Foust’s narrative landscape rendered with startling strokes of realism. Together, these books conjure the concept of California itself: unpredictable, honest, and uncommonly beautiful.

 

—Kristine Rae Anderson