{"id":5641,"date":"2013-11-17T09:00:29","date_gmt":"2013-11-17T09:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=5641"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:35:48","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:35:48","slug":"james-naiden-reviews-odessa-by-patricia-kirkpatrick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/james-naiden-reviews-odessa-by-patricia-kirkpatrick\/","title":{"rendered":"James Naiden Reviews ‘Odessa’ by Patricia Kirkpatrick"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A Poet\u2019s Journey of Abandonment, Near-Death \u2013 and Recovery.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a second collection of poems by the Iowa-born poet who has lived in St. Paul the last three decades or so. Not just living, it must be emphasized, but surviving ordeals \u2013 the collapse of her marriage, her brain surgery to remove a tumor the \u201csize of a baseball\u201d and then learning basics all over again \u2013 speaking, walking, driving a motor vehicle, the fundamentals of resuming life as a functioning woman in her late fifties, but always with the filling reservoir of language and poems, her gratitude and astonishment to be still alive.<\/p>\n

The central motif of this new collection is putatively \u201cOdessa\u201d \u2013 but not the city port at the Black Sea or the town in Texas. Instead, it refers to a small town about three hours west of Minneapolis near the South Dakota border. If one can gauge the chronology accurately, the poet\u2019s visit took place before her medical crisis (actually the dominant theme here). Kirkpatrick\u2019s gift is in her succinct language and bare yet full imagery. Here are central lines from the title poem:<\/p>\n

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I am always afraid of what might show up, suddenly.<\/p>\n

What might hide.<\/p>\n

At dusk I saw the start of low plateaus, plains<\/p>\n

really, even when planted. Almost to the Dakota border<\/p>\n

I was struck by the isolation and abiding loneliness<\/p>\n

yet somehow thrilled. Alone. Hardly another car on the road<\/p>\n

and in town, just a few teenagers<\/p>\n

wearing high-school sweatshirts, walking and laughing, on the edge<\/p>\n

of a world they don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

Darkness started in as heaviness in the colors<\/p>\n

of fields, a tractor, cornstalks, stone.<\/p>\n

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Kirkpatrick\u2019s first book, Century\u2019s Road<\/em>, appeared in 2004 and was well received but not widely reviewed. She was over fifty, but at least had her first book published, and began looking at her life\u2019s interstices for a second volume. Now a poetry teacher and professor, but not having arrived at poetry until her senior year at the University of Iowa, Kirkpatrick later went through divorce while her two children were not quite on their own. Still, the functions of termination had to be endured, recounted in a sequence titled \u201cThe Italo Poems\u201d and borne without rancor in \u201cThe Attorney\u201d \u2013 as these opening lines attest:<\/p>\n

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Your husband is leaving.<\/p>\n

You have to choose.<\/p>\n

You have to get an attorney.<\/p>\n

Go downtown near the steeple and the derelict pigeons<\/p>\n

where the bells alone cost millions.<\/p>\n

Walk into corporate heights, crying,<\/p>\n

state your name at the desk,<\/p>\n

weep at a table longer than your dining room,<\/p>\n

decide what to keep and give up.<\/p>\n

Smart and tough<\/p>\n

without love, the attorney<\/p>\n

knows the law, knows the patterns . . .<\/p>\n

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How should one quantify bad luck, or what seems like it at the time? In this book, Kirkpatrick prefers to convert negativity into poems marking her journey\u2019s byways \u2013 medical, physical, and emotional. She displays no interest in vengeance or score settling.<\/p>\n

What came next, of course, was her brain tumor, recounted first in a thirteen-page sequence of synchronous yet restrained verse both mellifluous and stark. Indeed, \u201cBrain Tumor\u201d is a tumbling but focused recalling of her precipitous dance with mortality: \u201cYou stumble because your brain has been pressed \/ for so long, its tissue is damaged, its current volcanic. \/\/ Now you understand the numbed foot, \/ the jumps, floaters, and tingling. \/ Now you are seized and perpetually falling . . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

The remarkable aspects of this collection resound in the witnessing Kirkpatrick does of herself, those around her, her efforts in recovery, doing her therapy as prescribed, good days and bad, persistence a recurring theme. In an eight-sonnet array, \u201cTime of the Flowers,\u201d she records her observations and includes tiny phrases from contemporary writers (e. g., Carolyn Forch\u00e9, Paul Gruchow, Laurie Scheck, Peter Sacks, Carol Bly, and others) at the bottom of the pages instead at the top near the title. This leads the reader to concentrate on the poem first, not so much a quote from someone else. Still, these sonnets also weave allusions to Greek mythology, Native American literature, and other voices preceding her lifetime. Her themes flow seamlessly, the images both independent but merging into each other, as in the second sonnet, \u201cSurvivor\u2019s Guilt\u201d:<\/p>\n

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How I\u2019ve changed may not be apparent.<\/p>\n

I limp. Read and write, make tea, boiling water<\/p>\n

as I practiced in rehab. Sometimes, like fire,<\/p>\n

a task overwhelms me. I cry for days, shriek<\/p>\n

when the phone rings. Like a page pulled from flame,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m singed but intact: I don\u2019t burn the house down.<\/p>\n

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Later, cleared to drive, I did outpatient rehab. Others<\/p>\n

lost legs or clutched withered minds in their hands.<\/p>\n

A man who can\u2019t speak recognized me<\/p>\n

and held up his finger, meaning \u201cone year since<\/p>\n

your surgery.\u201d Mine. Sixteen since his. Guadalupe<\/p>\n

wishes daily to be the one before.<\/em> Nobody<\/p>\n

is that. Like love, the neurons can cross fire.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t get everything back.<\/p>\n

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No, perhaps not, but the poet still has her tools at the ready. This book, most of which was written after Patricia Kirkpatrick\u2019s brain surgery, is testament to the gifts she has always had. Odessa<\/em> has numerous and recurring themes, metaphors and allusions weaving in and out in surprising ways \u2013 the small town with a famous name she visited on the prairie, her personal losses, her desperate but successful efforts at keeping rational perspective when her life was in serious jeopardy, going beyond that to make poems, to reclaim her life and keep on. In so doing, Odessa<\/em> is a gift to us all.<\/p>\n

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Odessa<\/em> by Patricia Kirkpatrick is published by Milkweed Editions.\u00a0 Order your copy here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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                      A Poet\u2019s Journey of Abandonment, Near-Death \u2013 and Recovery. This is a second collection of poems by the Iowa-born poet who has lived in St. Paul the last three decades or so. Not just living, it must be emphasized, but surviving ordeals \u2013 the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5641"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23713,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5641\/revisions\/23713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}