The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement by Diane Lockward
Wind Books, 2016
Diane Lockward, author of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop and founder of Terrapin Books, has written a book whose craft is searing in vivid colors, a poetry collection that seethes with subtle outrage and beautiful grief. Taking its texts from narratives of an undefended childhood and life’s many later assaults, Lockward’s poems consider the prospects of life’s improvement or worsening.
Whether her subject is nine renegade monkeys escaped from a testing lab, or the red dress (re-dress) of a child dreaming of freedom from abuse, this poetry takes “quick, sharp steps like flint against steel.” There is taut craft here, along with unfailing wit, and a pleasing defiance, even when defiance fails to change anything. The poems cover the field of loss: shock, grieving, pain, and acceptance. Somehow, in exploring these dimensions of life, they manage to shimmer and awe.
Lockward directly takes on life’s brevity and faces it squarely. Her memento mori, awareness of mortality, can even take turns into the fantastic, as in the breathtakingly beautiful poem “The Pull of Bones.” The poem situates itself in the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, where the bones of deceased monks have been nailed to the walls as ornament and reminder:
decorative motifs of triangles and circles,
frescoes, columns, and arches, and suspended
from ceilings, filigree of lacey bones, shadesmuting the light, a chimeless clock of vertebrae
foot bones, and finger bones, its single hand
not marking time—all the final remains of friarsasleep for years, exhumed and preserved
for beauty’s sake, six rooms on the Via Veneto,
each underground and airless as a coffin
In this new collection, Lockward sings primarily of mortality and loss, but often with wit and humor, and delightfully augmenting those devices, devices of sound and structure: sestinas, rhyming couplets or triplets, slant rhymes, patterns on the page. With the skill of a dancer, she uses devices to dazzle and divert, so that the meaning, as it coheres onto the page, provides a surprise. Even color, as in “‘Why Yellow Makes Me Sad,’” gets a workout, as you read along and wonder how, in every line, the poet can evoke the color without repeating the word or its synonyms—and she does so by instead naming all the things so colored, the most surprising being “the coward’s streak” and the great pairing of “journalism and egg yolks.” In less skilled hands, these losses and mortality meditations might be maudlin, but in Lockward’s word and sound play, they’re fresh and offset by lively invention.
It should come as no surprise that the author of The Crafty Poet, A Portable Workshop, can exercise mastery of form and diversity of topics in her own poetry. Lockward’s skill in craft is evident in this collection, which revels in variety and reads at times like a memoir or novel. These poems kept me reading, as if turning pages of a novel, the stories unfolding in every direction.
Rachel Dacus’s recent poetry collection, Gods of Water and Air, follows two other books, Earth Lessons and Femme au Chapeau. Her writing has appeared in Atlanta Review, Boulevard, Drunken Boat, The Pedestal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. In January 2018, Fiery Seas Publishing will publish her debut novel, The Renaissance Club, which features the great Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini.