Queen of a Rainy Country: Poems Book

The bookstore I browse through on Main Street of my small town is decent for it's size. And though the poetry section takes up a good portion of it, I still always find myself wanting MORE. It's central Vermont, so there are shelves of the New England poets, the modern writers who are taught in these parts. Very little of color or the world outside of our national borders. Even worse, though, is a lack of representation of the rest of American poetry, the blue-collar, middle class versifiers. I'm sure this is common in most bookstores. And I know how lucky I am to have more than a few shelves to peruse. Nothing against the shops themselves.

So after weeks of browsing through the poetry offerings, I was surprised to find Linda Pastan there between Garrison Keiller and Walt Whitman. I read a couple of random poems, all of which knocked my socks off. Or rather, the lyrical and emotional intensity of the poems I'd read had me holding my breath, for fear of disturbing the cocoon of the poetic worlds before they finished revealing themselves. How could I not finish a poem that started:

In the walled garden
where my illusions grow,
the lilac, watered, blooms all winter,
and innocence grows like moss
on the north side of every tree.

("In the Walled Garden")

The images arose like ivy and the musical mythic voice pulled me into the secluded world of her imagination. How could I not trust a poet who then Socratically answered the title question of "Why Are Your Poems So Dark?" with a few of her own?

Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished

Lastly, the clincher for me buying this book was "Things I Didn't Know I Loved", written after a poem by Nazim Hikmet. Mostly for nostalgic reasons I guess. I discovered Hikmet's poem in high school. I can't recall which book it was anthologized in. But it was one of those rare poems I needed to photocopy and stick in my back pocket, wherever I went. I probably have it with me still, in a moldering box in the basement. It doesn't matter. The point is that poem fed me for so long, at a time when I needed it.

Now in my hands was a book by someone who might have known what that meant or was like.

My reaction to reading Queen of a Rainy Country cover to cover was a mix of slight disappointment and satisfaction.

There are a couple ways I read a poetry book--straight through (most likely, as the author intended it) or randomly (usually fine for collections). The random moment at the bookstore v. the straight reading at home proved quite different.

In pieces, this book contains small gems of insight into the compromises of living the average life, of writing and leaving the past behind. Collected, the book tells of a woman with a lineage she's lost touch with meditating on the obligations of age and persistence of death. As a whole, Pastan writes about writing and looking back. Instead of a collection of poetic moments(as I thought I might be getting), I got a life, reflected upon. Disappointed yet satisfied, as I might possibly find myself one day, looking back.

And that is the other thing. I see in this book a mirror of my future poetic life (or one to model from). There will be that looking-back time in my life, when it comes, when all those trying times have been written and published, when my voice has been heard and the need to call out has subdued. After the awards and citations, where will I be? Perhaps living my life as a book, already written. I could be satisfied with Linda Pastan's version of poetics and passions all grown up.

This is either fact or prophecy--
my one life no more than a spool

("Thought Upon Waking")