{"id":791,"date":"2024-08-11T21:21:55","date_gmt":"2024-08-12T01:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=791"},"modified":"2024-08-11T21:21:55","modified_gmt":"2024-08-12T01:21:55","slug":"review-of-in-the-tempered-dark-edited-by-lisa-fay-coutley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=791","title":{"rendered":"Review of In the Tempered Dark edited by Lisa Fay Coutley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cover<\/a>Lisa Fay Coutley, ed. In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy. <\/em>Black Lawrence Press, 2023. 403 pgs. $29.95.<\/p>\n

Lisa Fay Coutley has done a masterful job editing this new ambitious anthology of poems responding to grief. As every reader knows, grief is always complicated\u2014because our feelings about the deceased are often complicated and because every death, as Hopkins so eloquently articulates, reminds us of our own mortality. The poems in In the Tempered Dark <\/em>acknowledge the range of responses individuals experience, for let\u2019s face it, not everyone who dies is a \u201cloved one,\u201d and even loved ones aren\u2019t always loved absolutely or absolutely all the time.<\/p>\n

And sometimes people or things are gone without being dead. Grief is accompanied by frustration, relief, guilt, despair, anger, bewilderment. So the poems here are more honest than many eulogies, but the anthology succeeds not only because of its variety of content. Stylistically, the poems are also diverse, which makes turning the page refreshing and often surprising. The range of voices confirms that this is an anthology<\/em>, not simply a group of poems that could have been written by the same person. In addition, in a unique feature, each contributor has written a prose accompaniment to their poems, providing context for the content or thoughts on composition.<\/p>\n

Contributors include poets who are far along in their careers and already well known\u2014Diane Seuss, Janet Burroway, Ilya Kaminsky\u2014younger poets who have published one or two or three collections\u2014W. Todd Kaneko, Malachi Black, Meg Day\u2014as well as poets who will be new to many readers. This makes it challenging to cite just a few, but it also means that readers of the book will be richly rewarded regardless of how many reviews they\u2019ve read. Rather than focus on one or two representative poems to examine in detail, as I generally do with single-author collections, I\u2019ll comment briefly on several.<\/p>\n

Composed on couplets, Rebecca Aranson\u2019s \u201cStar Dust\u201d initially looks spare, with its regularity and frequent space breaks between stanzas. It seems to begin in media res: \u201cAnd then somehow a slipping away, as if wanting no one to linger with you \/ at the door making plans for next time. You had come without a coat\u2026\u201d Readers quickly understand the circumstances. The deceased was likely elderly, the speaker\u2019s father, living in a nursing home where the speaker\u2019s mother also resides. The death seems to have been one many of us hope for, \u201ca slipping away\u201d after a long life. This knowledge, however, does not mitigate the grief of the survivors, nor does it do much to soften our knowledge of our human condition. In its last section, the poem brings the reader into its circumstances by extending outward. Here are its final lines:<\/p>\n

Grief is in you from the start and in you at the end
\nand though sometimes your days are flooded with it,<\/p>\n

and sometimes your days are clear, we are made of it
\nas much as we are made of the ruins<\/p>\n

of the first flaming star, whose far flung dust still spins
\nus into being.<\/p>\n

Aronson here complicates that uplifting clich\u00e9, that we are made of stardust, revealing a deeper and more complete truth.<\/p>\n

Victoria Chang\u2019s prose poem \u201cThe Clock\u201d also explores the speaker\u2019s father\u2019s situation. Though alive, he\u2019s experiencing dementia, an inability to think abstractly that Chang initially explores through the symbolism of an analog clock face. Interpreting it is more complicated than we often realize, with the numbers each standing for more than one idea\u2014seconds, minutes,\u00a0 hours. About two-thirds of the way through the poem, she introduces another metaphor, leading to her conclusion:<\/p>\n

If you unfold an origami swan, and flatten the paper, is the paper sad because it has\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 seen the shape of the swan or does it aspire towards flatness, a life without creases?\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 My father is the paper. He remembers the swan but can\u2019t name it. He no longer knows the\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 paper swan represents an animal swan. His brain is the water the animal swan once swam\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 in, holds everything, but when thawed, all the fish disappear. Most of the words we say\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 have something to do with fish. And when they\u2019re gone, they\u2019re gone.<\/p>\n

What does it mean to remember without access to words? Each of the metaphors in this poem reveals something about the nature of human thought, our ability to understand one thing as another, to see a piece of paper and recall an animal, even an animal we might never have seen, to see a numeral and know that it signifies both a word and a concept. For readers and writers, this knowledge that words disappear can be particularly disturbing, even as we savor the image of a folded piece of paper and its representation of an elegant creature.<\/p>\n

Several poems in this anthology grieve the non-human, including Jenny Dasre-Orafai\u2019s \u201cWe Lost Three Billion Birds in Forty-Nine Years.\u201d The speaker attempts to visualize the three billion, a number that is, if not literally uncountable, nevertheless unimaginable. The poem explores some of the other absences that follow, as well as the possibilities the birds\u2019 absence ironically provide. The concluding lines are particularly suggestive: \u201cWe\u2019ve got so much food in the feeder and \/ the other animals can\u2019t get their fill.\u201d The other animals\u2014perhaps squirrels or chipmunks or skunks, perhaps ourselves. These lines articulate a call to conscience for human beings whose insatiable appetites have created this crisis of climate change and extinction.<\/p>\n

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram\u2019s \u201cThey were armed with long guns\u201d is one of the most stylistically unusual poems as well as one of the most overtly political in the anthology. It is arranged into ten sections, beginning with a single-line opening: \u201cand that\u2019s how everyone they shot, died.\u201d We know immediately that this poem will address gun violence in America. Three of the sections are titled \u201cI, Rearrangement Servant\u201d and consist of words composed of letters contained in the title, for example \u201cWhere were you last night? \/ Sheltering \/\/ in the theater\u2026\u201d and \u201cit is early to be dying.\u201d Three of the sections begin with the line, \u201cI fear for my life at the following places (circle all that apply)\u201d and contain options like \u201cShopping Malls,\u201d \u201cParties,\u201d and \u201cLandmarks.\u201d The third of these sections, however, contains only one word repeated twelve times: \u201cSchool.\u201d Two of the sections are more conventionally poetic in their appearance. In one, the speaker is leading a class discussion on a poem describing murder. In the final section, the speaker describes a \u201cdollbaby\u201d belonging to a friend\u2019s son, a doll named Pete that shoots bullets out of its hand and feet. This toy that should provide comfort instead introduces the child to that most American characteristic: a gun. \u201cThey were armed with long guns\u201d is conceptually ambitious and memorable in its execution.<\/p>\n

All of the poems in this book merit extended discussion. Lisa Fay Coutley has thoughtfully edited In the Tempered Dark, <\/em>selecting poems that complement each other in form as well as content, and choosing\u00a0 poems that also succeed individually in terms of craft. The range of the poems taken as a whole and the accomplishment of each one create a gratifying reading experience.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lisa Fay Coutley, ed. In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy. Black Lawrence Press, 2023. 403 pgs. $29.95. Lisa Fay Coutley has done a masterful job editing this new ambitious anthology of poems responding to grief. As every reader knows, grief is always complicated\u2014because our feelings about the deceased are often complicated and because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[71,70],"class_list":["post-791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-areviewaweek","category-uncategorized","tag-in-the-tempered-dark","tag-lisa-fay-coutley","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":793,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions\/793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}