The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement

by Diane Lockward

Diane Lockward, more than any other poet now writing, exemplifies Garcia Lorca's definition of poet as the professor of the five bodily senses. She revels in sensory language, often lip-smacking language, and she can make the language of terror and loss as spine-tingling as the beauty of a last stab of sunset before it disappears. The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement, with its cryptic title, invites us to join her in nothing less than a poetic banquet where we are seduced by the "Red of the raspberry, its drupelets a nest of sexual seeds, / and the music, pepper hot and red," or challenged by the never-ending unwinding of Lockward's interior landscape seeking its exterior expression in the physical world around her: "I build a nest of silken floss / and tiny twigs, / watch the lives on the other side." Make no mistake, though, the artistic weaving in these poems is tough as knots that "hold their weight, that won't come undone." This book is a feast to which Garcia Lorca himself would give a five-star rating.

--Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina Poet Laureate, 2005-2009

Genres: Poetry

116 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2016

About the author

Diane Lockward is the editor of The Strategic Poet: Honing Your Craft as well as the editor of The Practicing Poet, The Crafty Poet II, and The Crafty Poet II. She is also the author of four poetry books, most recently The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement. Her previous books are Temptation by Water, What Feeds Us, which received the 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, and Eve's Red Dress (2003). Her poems have been published in several anthologies and in such journals as the Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writers Almanac., and Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry. She lives in northern New Jersey and can be contacted at her website.

Reviews

[Karen Craigo · Rating 5 out of 5]

As literary citizens go, Diane Lockward is a dynamo. Her blog, Blogalicious: Notes on Poetry, Poets, and Books, and its accompanying newsletter provide so much useful information for writers. Just today I consulted an old Blogalicious post that lists dozens of books that publish book reviews. Although I have never met Diane, I refer to her valuable information all the time, and she feels like an old friend.

I was also captivated by the title of the most recent of her four books of poetry, The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement (West Caldwell, NJ: Wind Publications, 2016). I struggle with titles, and a great title pulls me right in. The importance of a great title is lesson one of book one of the Appreciations series (which I designed to teach me more about poetry).

This collection is not for the timid. Its first death appears in the second poem, and violence and death are peppered throughout the manuscript. The word “unflinching” appears in every third book blurb (with “luminous” occurring in every first and second), but Lockward’s poetry really doesn’t flinch from the ugliness of both nature and human nature.

Nor does Lockward flinch from beauty, which shines radiantly (dare I say luminously?) through these pages. The beauty is all the bolder because it is positioned alongside cruelty and loss and some ugliness.

Lockward is brave in her presentation, in poems that feel personal and incredibly honest. I like this snippet, from her poem “I Want to Save the Trees”:


 On my knees, I beg the oak’s forgiveness.
If I’d known that the filthy knife wielder was rotten
as a diseased Dutch Elm, I would not have let him
shove in his blade and carve a heart into the bark,
his initials and mine forever locked inside,
my tree wounded, forever tattooed like a prisoner.

To me, the pain Lockward describes seems also to be the poet’s pain, and the reader feels it, too—that knife-thrust, that wounding.

Lockward also writes beautifully about relationships, as in the poem “The Phone Call,” about a call—she doesn’t specify the content—that changes everything for the one who receives it.

You will stick together, moving
like two shadows, the sorrow
between you a cord stretched
from one to the other,
the life you build
like a house, one room closed,
cordoned off as in a museum,
behind the rope,
the furniture of your grief ….

I see that couple’s stilted dance, and I recognize it—see myself following its box-steps. I found this description unbelievably moving.

The gorgeousness in the manuscript doesn’t occur in, say, depictions of flowers (although, come to think of it, there are some, and beautiful ones). I found the poems most lush and compelling when they offered unexpected beauty—the iridescence of fly wings as they swarm over a dead bird, in “the frenzied dance of thieves come to ransack a mansion,” or the gift of a dead rat brought by a cat in “the small purse of her mouth.” When Lockward writes, “Even in this there is beauty,” her words vibrate in me, and make me look around my own room in a primed, expectant way.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

She had me from the cover. First the title: who could resist “carrots of atonement,” an appetizer for delicious poems, a promise of wit and whimsy? Obviously it’s hard not to pick up the charming, fuzzy bunny either. Lockward has set a decoy to lure you into her snare. If you want soft bunny poems to share with children, back away. The rest of you will find these poems engaging, horrifying, and delightful. Lockward masters the art of marrying horror with humor that I so admire in poems by Thomas Lux and Margaret Atwood.

The glass is half full and half empty: Lockward keeps a balance of dark and light, happiness and disaster. Sweet pets will meet bad ends. Critters that revolt us (snakes, rats) will get sympathy. She will keep you guessing, yet write with such an easy, accessible style you won’t expect the sudden jab to your gut.

I won’t disturb the author’s trap by telling you what carrots of atonement are, but I’ll give you a few tastes of her delicious writing. “The Phone Call” is one of her most touching, heart-wrenching poems. I marveled that Lockward never tells us what the phone call said, yet readers will know the answer, or at least what that call would say to you. She opens with a pleasant breakfast scene

“when the phone rings,
and suddenly you’re racing
up the stairs, breakfast
turning cold, the morning
crushed like a sheet of tin.”

A few lines later, “you” reach your husband, coming out of the shower

“clean and fresh,
smelling of mint and line,
his strong arms around you,
no words at all –
he already knows what’s wrong.”

In “Thinking Like a Buddhist,” the author wonders as I often have, “Where do birds go to die?” Her wondering leads to macabre scenes worthy of a sequel to Hitchcock’s The Birds. Yet, as I said before, the collection is balanced. There are also poems that made me laugh: e.g., one about fortune cookie writers, another about the one monkey who wasn’t recaptured after escaping a lab:

“If you find a monkey wearing a wool cap,
that’s the wrong monkey.”

Lockward also offers some quieter, reflective moments to savor the simple joys of life – like chocolate, avocados, and romance. You should definitely leave the carrots of atonement uneaten to save room for this poetry feast.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her newest collection of poetry, Diane Lockward explores the violence and darkness in every day life. Whether she is recounting a memory of a young boy destroying the body of what he thinks is a dead turtle or writing, in sestina form, about a persona who loves true crime novels, she ventures into a shadowy world that is often not explored in poetry. Her best collection yet!

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engrossing and often mesmerizing collection of poems. Lockward has a distinct poetic voice: narrative and personal, often plumbing below the crust of sorrow and remembrance to retrieve "the earth wet, but not washed clean." Many of the poems play in that hard-to-find place between funny and tragic without ever fully capitulating to cynicism. Consider the last stanza of the poem titled "Why I Read True Crime Books":

I won't be broken by the book in my hands.
That vacant stare, the mayhem, the empty bed,
all theirs, not ours the grief in that flowerless house.


There are many poems here that are located in the private realms of domesticity...marriage and loss and perseverance inside the walls of the household...squirrels and birds doing their thing in backyards. And more philosophical poems including my favorite poem of the whole collection: "The Light Sets the Record Straight." It is a perfect poem...every word and line crafted exactly where it was meant to be.

The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement is surely one of the best titles for a poetry book in years. Don't leave them uneaten though. Buy and feast. Your eyesight will be improved.