Sakura Park: Poems

by Rachel Wetzsteon

A spirited new book from "the most variously gifted of our new poets" (Richard Howard). With this third collection, Rachel Wetzsteon continues to imprint American verse with her particular brand of smart, tart poems. These new pieces employ her remarkable formal agility in order to showcase an assortment of quarreling learning and loss, autonomy and loneliness, love and work. The result is the rare book that is equal parts sass and sorrow.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published July 7, 2006

About the author

Rachel Todd Wetzsteon was an American poet.

Reviews

[Jonathan Hernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

7/7

“There is still a chance the empty gazebo
will draw crowds from the greater world.
And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing:
the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.”

“I’m burning all these candles not to shirk
a night of passion, but to give that night
a richly textured backdrop when it comes.”

[Gabriel Valjan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The late Wetzsteon was, like her predecessors Auden, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane, a poet of the city, albeit not of an entire city. She lived and died in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her foremost influence is W.H. Auden, for which she has been criticized. I suspect that metrical poetry today is perceived as artificial and cold while turns of phrases are considered clever and witty, but Wetzsteon's poetry is not cotton candy superficial. Many of her poems use the consistent theme of clouds and sky to mirror the insidious nature of depression without becoming confessional or dramatic. Her poems are painful in a less obvious way, as in “Love and Work,” where she wants to be intellectual and sexually attractive but is also aware that society and other women will not allow the two possibilities for their fellow women:

I’m poring over theorems, tomes and tracts.
I’m getting ready for a heavy date
by staying up ridiculously late.
But a small voice advises, Face the facts:
go on this way and you’ll soon come to harm.
The world’s most famous scholars wander down
the most appalling alleyways in town,
a blond and busty airhead on each arm.
There is an inner motor known as lust
that makes a man of learning walk a mile
to gratify his raging senses, while
the woman he can talk to gathers dust.
A chilling vision of the years ahead
invades my thoughts, and widens like a stain:
a barren dance card and a teeming brain,
a crowded bookcase and an empty bed...

Wetzsteon is like Ezra Pound in that she is aware of all the personae women must use to survive in the world, but she is not polemical or political about it; she would rather it not overwhelm her within her poems while she observes discordant behavior and contradictions for the reader. Her poems are witty, light, and charming, with a hint of frivolity and occasional sadness. There is gallow's humor in her “Mystery for Cigarettes,” knowing that the habit is unhealthy and that smoke is metaphor-rich: delusion, glamor, illusion, and self-destruction

vices are smokescreens for
facing true love's trials:
stub in one hand, scotch
in the other, I endure
such fire and water

Wetzsteon should not be compared to Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Bishop, as some critics, for some inexplicable reason, seem to do. It is true that she did not write poetry as the Baudelaire of The Bowery but she did create evocative imagery in her “Blue Octavo Haiku,” and walk the reader through, among other things, break-ups, crack-ups, an ambulance ride, and cherry blossoms in “Sakura Park.” The unfortunate thing about hindsight with Rachel Wetzsteon is that we know she read Auden, that she died, and that she left behind a legacy of poetry, but the uncomfortable feeling I get in reading her poems is the same feeling I got in reading Plath and Sexton, and that is the inevitable in her poem “Sakura Park”:

some rules of conduct: refuse to choose
between turning pages and turning heads
though the stubborn dine alone. Get over
“getting over”: dark clouds don't fade
but drift with ever deeper colors.
Give up on rooted happiness...

Rachel Wetzsteon, despondent over a failed relationship, committed suicide Christmas 2009, aged 42.

[Christina M M Rau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sakura Park is filled with sadness and some hope, and lots of New York New York in a non-touristy, native way.

I appreciate the word play. She plays with sounds and homophones and rhyme and words that sound alike and are one letter away but have completely different meanings. Is there a word for that? You know, like union/onion or buster/bluster. No, these are not the word pairings she uses; that would probably make for a really bad collection. Her collection is the opposite of bad.

On a personal note, I was deeply saddened by Wetzsteon's passing; I learned a lot from her workshop. She was and remains an inspiration.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are brilliant poems, very expressive, but written within formal poetic forms. The one that has captured my attention to the extent that I am now memorizing it is "The Mystery of Cigarettes," a series of haiku describing Wetzsteon's relationship with "gracious sticks." They are marbled with guilt and health concerns, but these poems absolutely nail the pleasure of smoking. My favorites of her other themes are the kind of devastating sorrow from love affairs gone wrong and her musings about autumn in the city. After checking this book out of the library numerous times, I finally realized that I simply had to possess this volume, so I ordered it yesterday.

[Douglas Hopkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bias here: the cover is mine, a photo from when we lived near Columbia University, only a block from lovely Sakura Park. See [http://douglashopkins.blogspot.com/].

The poetry is even exceeds the high level of the photography, if I may say so! The poems are personal views of NYC, of which Sakura Park is one of those tiny havens hidden in the city.

I used take our daughter up there for walks, in her first two years. Across the street is Grant's Tomb, one of the most beautiful buildings in America.

I have several autographed copies which I would barter out.

[Mia Tryst · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rachel Wetzsteon, a prominent poet whose work was known for its mordant wit, formal elegance and cleareyed examination of the solitary yet defiant lives of single women, was found dead on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 42. Truly a great loss to the world of poetry. Review to follow.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sadly the due date at the library came up before I finished this collection of sad, urban poems. Filled with beautiful imagery of cities, primarily New York, and tied together with a thread of loneliness, these are wonderful poems by a poet who had mastered classical forms. Her recent death is a waste and a sorrow.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sadly, I discovered Rachel Wetzsteon just after she passed away. This collection got me thinking about how poetry can address and guide the reader. Wetzsteon often acknowledges the reader, and she often uses humor. Sidenote: she writes sonnets (took me awhile to even recognize as such).

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a 3.5. The poems I loved I really loved, it just wasn't everything.

Umbrella Weather was probably my favorite.
"...I’m foreign, I’m freakish, I’m out of the loop
until a storm comes and I’m in it again
only deeper now, with a smile no news can ruin."

The other highlights to me were the haiku form poems. Flaneur Haiku is about walking around "her city," NYC, a theme she returns to often, but I think she shines in this more limited format of an extended form haiku.

I also loved Blue Octavo Haiku, which starts with:
"In fat armchairs sat
indolence and impatience,
plotting my downfall."

Genius.

"Happiness? Finding
your indestructible core;
leaving it alone."

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was initially excited by the formal poems, but found that many of them veered into predictable sentimentality. Some of them are just downright badly written. On the other hand, there are some gems in this book that I think I will find myself returning to often. Overall, an uneven read.

[Tony]

[ no stars ]