Maxine Chernoff, Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems

 

3.
Roll over, Oscar Wilde. MeetGertrude Stein
and the Little Sparrow. MeetJim Morrison and

Chopin too. Deeper and deeperour travels
took us: there wasCreate, whose indoor toilets
were the first preserved.The tourists

from the cruise had sealegs, as Knossos listed
right or left. TheMexican economist hated
America’s presumptions,he confessed at dinner,
before the ping pong balldisappeared into the Aegean.

I thought Ship ofFools, how doomed
our journeys, feltcomfort in moss roses curled
around a railing wheremen worked sums.
The castle from the Crusades,rehabbed by Mussolini:
palimpsest of wrongideas: and no plot to save us. (“Zonal”)

Iwas curious to see a copy of Mill Valley, California poet and editor Maxine Chernoff’s latest, Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems (Cheshire MA:MadHat Press, 2023), a collection that selects poems across six of her nineteenbooks of poetry— (Apogee Press, 2005), The Turning (Apogee Press, 2007) [see my review of such here], To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn, 2011), Without (Shearsman Books, 2012) [see my review of such here], Here (Counterpath Press, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Camera(Subito Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]—as well as a healthy openingsection of new poems. Focusing on her work with and through sonnets, sequences,extended lines and other lyric structures, Light and Clay exists as a counterpointto her Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems (MadHat Press, 2019) [see my review of such here], andthe two collections paired offer an interesting overview of Chernoff’sattention to poetic structure. “Love’s tender mercies clear the air,” shewrites, to open the poem “Traced,” “Unhinging the gate to practiced longing. /Tied to life, you spill into water, deeper / Than any atmosphere.” Chernoff’spoems extend lines of thought across great distances, whether the line, thepoem or as a sequence of pulled-apart sentences, offering a lyric that works toarticulate and examine intellectual and physical space. Hers is a lyric,essentially, of seeing, and what she sees is illuminating. As the short poem “Granted”ends: “We stayed in bed for years / and took our cures patiently / from eachother’s cups. / We read Bleak House and / stored our money in socks. /Nothing opened as we did.”

Whereasher prose poem selected opens with an introduction by Robert Archambeau, thiscollection exists without, which, as regular readers of this space are alreadyfully aware, I consider a severe oversight for any selected or collected; it isimportant to place writer and writing within context, and offer why and howthis collection was decided upon, let alone shaped. For example: did the authormake the selections herself? What was the process of these books selected, andselected from, and not others? Either way, opening with the sixteen-part sonnetsequence, “Zonal,” the poems in the “new” section employ an increased complexity(compared to the other poems throughout), providing a layering of image, insight,craft and instability, finely-woven with deceptive ease. The shift across thebody of her work, at least as presented in this two hundred page-plus volume,is intriguing, subtle and even clarifying. This is an incredible work by a severelyunderrated poet, sliding under the radar for more than enough time (a recentfolio on her work did appear recently in Denver Quarterly, Vol 57 No. 4(2023), edited by Lea Graham, although the issue itself doesn’t seem to belisted anywhere on their website).

You Took the Dare

To live here and there,as recluse
and as host. While everythingexploded
and flames turned waterred, you
suggested a menu and gaveto
a proper cause. Nothing endured
the losses around you,the final note
that sounded past alarm. Acloudy
resemblance of what oncesufficed came
to be known as grace asyou listened
to grass growing, to aboy praying
near the great stonewall. Crisis after
crisis stacked up likeplanes in fog.
You counted moss-coveredbricks near
the former factory,where, at sunset,
brown light flickered.
What else to do but live?