Book Review by Cathy Warner
When I turn to poetry, I often turn to the psalms, those earliest songs that gave voice to the psalmist’s highest praise, deepest lament, and bitterest desires for revenge. The psalmist left no part of the interior life hidden from God. And those loftiest and darkest of thoughts, so eloquently crafted, were offered not only for God but to the worshipping community, then and now. What a gift it is to speak the ancient psalms together in worship, uttering joy and sorrow, admitting our human brokenness and pain. A necessary unmasking of those vulnerable and tender parts of ourselves we would otherwise keep hidden.
Reading Carol L. Park’s first book of poetry, Songs Sharp and Tender, feels a bit like opening the book of Psalms. Inside, we find a poet who has dropped any veneer of perfection, a writer who turns her unflinching yet compassionate gaze to the challenges of identity as she navigates the ever-changing waters of familial relationships. Her poems ring with careful and nuanced considerations arising from close observations of loved ones and immersion in the natural world from her suburban backyard garden to grander exotic vistas.
Park asks in the early poem “Bark Peeled Back,” “Fog hides our aches and doubts / churning deep––how to make / of midlife days some lasting art?”” Songs Sharp and Tender is her answer.
Composed of four parts in conversation with each other, thematic epigraphs set the tone for each section, as Park writes of emotional maturity (“When I took the marriage pledge, I understood little”), hope (“Oh, for the know- / how with the tender bloom of home.”), beauty (“But pink hyacinths––magnets / to my eyes––jeweled crowns / rise as ecstatic congregants”), and beginnings/endings (“In February’s start, soft swords in the yard / daily grow longer––gentle fronds.”).
Looking at life through the lens of someone long-married and part of a wider family, as one who has raised and launched daughters into the world, as one who is an involved grandmother, and as one who has lost parents, Park eschews platitudes and clichéd declarations one might expect from poems focused on domesticity.
Instead, her words, set off with the artful use of line breaks, em-dashes, backslashes, and colon sets, invite readers to consider their own experiences and reactions.
Of staying a week in Oahu with in-laws, Park writes:
Should I curtain frank thoughts?
If I seal my lips
will I fit in
and safeguard love?
Celebrating a daughter’s graduation, she sees beyond the season of celebration:
Their futures look a blooming, but dogwoods’
masses of ovals travel from green & full
to tapered & though their blossoms
of stars abound, winter
shrivels & withers.
Drop.
When an ambulance ferries her husband to the E.R. she asks:
What do you say when your husband lies so
still on the firemen’s stretcher?
They heft him out our front door––
screen cinched open.
“See you later?”––our usual words don’t fit.
In “Love Comes Aflame,” a bare tree invites introspection as seasons in the poet’s life collide.
Through my windshield a bramble––denuded
tree––outside my station wagon
compels my eyes––naked limbs
months past emerald––frost drips from twining twigs.
Inside the hall my daughter kicks
an Irish jig––I mingle a locust’s woody
tangles with my mother’s mind and
manner––her supple cells dropped, crumbled, dust––
Alzheimer’s a wintering.
On the verge of becoming a grandmother, these words emerge:
My own daughter too bursts from
her seclusions––her transfiguration
jolts a child aroused deep inside––leaving me
And later, after visiting children and grandchildren return home:
honeyed hugs––leaning down or upright––linger
deep and cider memories pillow us––
frosty hard and sweet.
Under Park’s attentive gaze it is the everydayness of familial life, rather than grand dramatic gestures that shape, sustain, and enrich us. Even dirty laundry is worthy of examination, as she reveals in “The Keeper’s Manifesto.”
Carol’s website: https://www.carolpark.us/
Cathy Warner is author of three volumes of poetry: Difficult Gifts, Home By Another Road, and Burnt Offerings; and editor of three poetry anthologies. She writes, photographs landscapes and the night sky, renovates homes, and leads writing workshops in Western Washington. Find her at cathywarner.com.