The rightness of Benet's imagery surprises which such lines as these (also from "Harvest"):
The language they speak is a low, dark hum,
like a distant gathering of bees
claiming the horizon.
and (from "An Italian Romance"):
The sun is a giant cracked egg;
in its yolk even a single geranium
on a terrace forested with antennae
has the look of an old masterpiece.
and (from "Days of Awe"):
What of the body? Weaned of flesh,
the skin, shroud of bones.
In the lashed raft of a bed,
your outline
a crudely stitched hem.What of the mind? Filigree spice box
to cinnamon and cloves.
The scent of other days turns
your thoughts
to bitter seeds in your mouth.
We are blessed to fullness. In these poems, we sense that the world is an object for serious attention, to be approached with decorum and treated with solemnity; Benet's language and imagery do that.
Clarity of feeling and toughness of wisdom? The clarity of Benet's language goes a long way towards creating the clarity of feeling in these poems. The poet wants to say what she means, exactly. In "Quae Amissa, Salva," ("What has been lost is safe") the poet's father falls to sleep. She closes the door:
There was his labored breath, and outside, a world
between the changing light, ragged edges everywhere –
and somewhere in America, in the lifting mists,
the day begins.
In "Trees at Dawn," Benet describes morning's first light as:
... a halo
that obliterates the blueprint
of random stars riveting
night's dark in place.
In "Orpheus," she reports this:
Look, he says to no one in particular,
the world is full of things
unbecoming themselves....
Why are so many poets afraid to speak this clearly?
This is the shrewdness of these poems: a kind of tough wisdom which at times approaches the middlewestern. This line,
For whatever it takes, the sea makes payment
for instance, could be Benet's version of our middlewestern understanding that:
For whatever it gives, the land exacts tribute.
Reading these poems, at times I think of the dark middle European women who peopled Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis. In "Childhood," the poet acknowledges:
The wanderlust in me so strong,
it was hard
to distinguish from homesickness.
Many of those women who settled the middlewest could not go back to the home they came from and they could not call this place home; like Benet, they were lost in the darkness between wanderlust and homesickness. You always want your life to mean something, but you're not always sure it does. You may be one cipher in an infinite procession of them.
Continued at MAPMAKER - 5, below
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