On Christopher Jane Corkery’s “Love Took the Words”
Love Took the Words by Jane Corkery
Slant Books
86 pp. $27.00 hardback; $12.00 paper
Christopher Jane Corkery’s first book of poems, Blessing, was published by Princeton University Press in 1985, and it’s natural for a reader to be curious about the gap that precedes her new, second collection. The first line of the book’s first poem sets us straight: “Love took the words right out of my mouth.” Not eros but the charisma of ordinary life grips her and renders her speechless in “As in the Days of the Prophets”: “the sun up and down, the dish and the pot,/…/ the stairs unswept, the bed made….” These, and the world’s subtle glory—“the otter plunging/ in the icy water…/…/..the mud, the ice-slicked bark”—stun language from her. Not one of Tillie Olsen’s silences, Corkery suggests, but the breathless awe of wonder drew her from the practice of pen and ink. After 35 years, it’s good to see her back at work.
Love Took the Words is a book of greetings and farewells, as well as a quest for what’s sufficient to burnish the time between. Children are born, thrive, and set off into the world. A beloved husband dies. The wish to preserve them in verse permeates poems like “The Straps of Their Sandals.” Provoked by a fragment of Sappho, Corkery writes, “I have borne children, two sons,/Loved a daughter./ Will they be fodder?/Be found, millennia hence,/ Bronzed, as corpses,” with “…no one to know/ The sturdy beauty/Of their hands and their feet”? Maybe, maybe not. In “Replacement,” a vanished Staples store, lettering removed but still “pale but present, /like the mustache of a thirteen year-old boy,” contrasts with “You…gone, really, with no trace, no letter/ left for me to find, no last sonnet, no….” Desolate, the speaker can’t escape “this desert of the mind, a mind that couples you, and S T A P L E S.” Even the addition of a third, literary element—“Proust falling—or was it simply tripping?— and years later remembering the stumble as a kind of healing” doesn’t guarantee art’s restorative work: “This does not happen to me.”
Corkery’s grasp of poets—and poetics—graces each page. She reveals her devotion to Keats and Yeats through allusion—“When you’re young, it’s clear: truth is beauty,” she writes in “March” (the poem’s epigraph is “after Chaucer’s Mercilesse Beautie,” but there’s more than a touch of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” here)—and in biography. Toward the Irish master, though, she is ambivalent.
In the villanelle “It Was Yeats Who Took Me,” she’s a latter-day Leda; the boyfriend she holds off “until the time I couldn’t” is imagined as Yeats in disguise, enacting the rape at the heart of her poetry god’s poem. At 24, she studies Yeats in Ireland. But the Troubles intervene: watching the invasion of Bogside while sitting in a pub, Corkery asks, “A member of the mystical body of Yeats,//…//What planet were we citizens of that night/Who sat, all still, and watched as children fell?” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” echoes through Corkery’s “Patio,” where she delineates a prelapsarian paradise in the small space necessary for “…four chairs,/ A plate of pears,/ And a table of wood.” Still, she’s designing something Yeats could never accomplish. Protected from “Defeat, or heat,” and “… love embarrassed/ Because unanswered,” the patio becomes a metaphor for the womb, as the builder experiences from her summer yard “One child hiding/ Deep in forsythia,/ The other boldly/ Waiting to be born.”
Many of Corkery’s poems walk in the “footsteps of prosody”—her term, from “Because the Night Was Boisterous, Happy, You”—through three- or four-beat lines. They refine strategies of repetition to master, bend, or break received forms like rhymed couplets, sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles. Her voice lodges in our ear the harmonies of lullaby, ballad, and chorus, along with more irregular cadences. Let me give an example of the last from the book’s final poem, enlarging a detail from scenes described in the penultimate poem, “A Light”:
CODA: A PHOTO, NOT A SLIDE
Gangly calf, young you: long legs, the stance,
The clods of earth, and Mr. Morphy, as we called him,
Biding his time. A shadow. I was pinned in front of you
By your akimbo arms, your elegant hands.
We laughed like fools. And at dusk
from that small porch we watched the night-
hawks’ show. It was enough.
The lovely rhythm and pitch of “young you: long legs;” the rhyme of action and words in “pinned/akimbo;” the final kick in “dusk” and “hawks’”: here’s music enough for the mind and heart to mull and linger over.
The mission of Slant Books, according to its website, is to publish “books grounded in the sense of ‘felt life.’” In Christopher Jane Corkery’s Love Took the Words—complimented by its mysterious, meditative cover by John Lockwood—it succeeds completely.
Joyce Peseroff's fifth book of poems, Know Thyself, was designated a "must read" by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. Recent poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in On the Seawall, Plume, Plume Anthology, and The Massachusetts Review. She directed UMass Boston's MFA Program in its first four years, and currently blogs on writing and literature at joycepeseroff.com