Nimbly traversing the realities of our world, these poems present a full artistic vision through precise, humorous, and deeply serious accounts of the sights, sounds, and stories that surround us.
“The rain came first. Or was it soil?
A seed. Then a bird that shat the seed.”
Loosestrife for Porcupines is a collection that exudes confidence, vision, a wide-ranging curiosity, and an uncanny knack for distilling ideas into images and images into short, cutting descriptions.
This collection captures the urgency of our present moment with poems about an environment that is unruly (“Then, after rain, fire in the canyons. We came to think of mud in our mouths as a blessing.”), undocumented people struggling through mud and snow (“Homo Sapiens”), and the precarity of life everywhere. It celebrates the beauty of art with David Hockney paintings and Jim Moore poetry. And perhaps most surprisingly, and satisfyingly, it knows how to tell a good joke. The poem “Why I’m Glad this Poem Is Not a Horse” begins with these words: “It does not weigh 1500 pounds.” Loosestrife for Porcupines brims with the serious pleasures of language, of living, and of being attentive to the world around us.
“It happens over and over. Happiness spills from our arms like gathered windfalls.”
The poems in this collection come in many forms. There’s prose, free verse, loosely stanza-ed verses, and various blends of all three. Across this flexible style, Gordon’s voice remains a striking constant, speaking and describing with the evocative precision of a haiku. And while there are no haikus in the collection, that form remains just outside the frame, a subtle presence in poems like “Just Saying,” which could be easily broken into standalone shards—“Another day seen through gauze. Weighted boots. The air resists, and I ask again why I’m here.” Here, as elsewhere, there is no wind-up, no laying of groundwork or preparation. The poems say exactly what they mean immediately. Each line, sentence, stanza, stands alone as a concrete statement. There is a quality of truth, of sincerity, of distillation, of a person speaking with absolute candor that is the result of an expertly honed poetic talent.
“There’s nothing black like bear,
bear—black, fog or sun,
bear—black at the far edges of the field,
this morning, lying on steaming clover”
Language and the games and tricks it breeds are as much a presence in these poems as the objects and scenes depicted. There are multiple “history” poems that engage with the genesis and origins of life, the world, the current political predicament, and the insides of quarks through small language games. The chicken or the egg becomes a punchline rather than an eternal question in “A Brief History.” A hopelessly disintegrating country becomes a tired, mundane wish in “The Nth November:” “And I wish it were okay, as the nation tears itself apart again, to stand at the window and watch the snow.”
What remains in these moments are the power of language to hold and invert ideas—a rhyme reduces the ineluctable undertow of pessimism to snow; a nighttime terror is evaded by thinking the names of trees until “Oak. Oak. Oak.” becomes a kind of chant or quiet prayer for peace in “In Desperation, Trees.” Each in their own way, these poems attest not only to the force of an individual vision, but to the life-giving imaginative power of the written word.
“Yesterday, humankind was adamant. All day. Unbalanced. Destructive. Noisy. The best and kindest did what they do quietly.”
A collection of poems to live by, Loosestrife for Porcupines overflows with the imaginative vision and generosity of a poet taking stock of the world around her.
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