Ararat Book

Poetry begets poetry. Or poor prose, like this. Better yet, good poetry takes you to a deeper silence. You are stirred. I found the book or it found me by happenstance, walking by my daughter's shelves. She (my daughter now grown) had plucked it from my unread pile many years ago. And I read it, to be close to her, this way. The author let me be close to the poem's narrator, in a way that was unexpectedly raw and honest. A closeness. Not love or friendship, exactly. It was like being allowed into a childhood house you return to, now in ruins. In this room my father's slow death. There my sister's anger. Here my hunger unanswered. Rooms we all have in our houses but lack the courage to go in, much less to let anyone else in. Still, there was a distance between the "I" of the poems and the poet. There was no adolescent gushing here. Autobiography was transformed. The personal was universal. It wasn't the poet's soul I was being privy too but a soul created by the effort of art and thought and in that way my own soul. Why? I wondered at the poet's urge, the inner need for such truth, no longer confession but an illumination of mystery, a mirror of sorts. What did she want to give me and why? For surely, if it was just expression, the inner impulse would have been accomplished in the writing itself without the need to share. So there must be something else behind the careful placing of each simple word. She must have had me or someone like me in mind as she wrote. And impressing me was not the motive. She wanted me to understand what I read even if the words final meaning was only evoked, hinted at. Nor was she after my love or even my friendship exactly. Louise Gluck had some good, some gift in mind. As if she sought to transmit the need to communicate itself, the searching and looking being the only truth. Not the kind of good I would ordinarily seek on my own, all things considered. Because longing can hurt. Feeling can be hard. So I have to conclude it was the book that came out to find me. For my own good.