Just received Alabaster Flask, and I'm posting this at Amazon and BN.com.
Jennifer Reeser was born in 1968, the year I escaped high school. So at least two good things happened that year. Her first collection of verse, Alabaster Flask, is a knockout. Let the poet speak for herself:
Walking the Ruins
Grandmother made an art of mums and dills,
delphinium and every tender herb,
dreaming of her far-off Virginia hills,
filling the ground with life from curb to curb.
She knelt with mournful eyes the green of jade
each season, singing hymns to praise God’s pardon
and asking Him to touch the plot she’d made --
her latest work of genius in the garden.
Winter could not resist her, nor the glory
one finds by having daisies New Year’s Day,
the famous seed supplier’s cover story,
and strangers at the screen from miles away.
I never lacked for colors in that place.
Her daughter brought me up in monochrome
as elegant and cold as any face
which one time deemed itself a god of Rome,
and Mother gone, with Grandmother yet going
into that garden all will someday go,
it’s only now I see her art was sowing
a seed within me only she could grow.
This is the work of a young woman who chooses her words with great care and with refreshing accuracy. Just run the ums, ers, and ills of that first stanza through your mouth several times. She makes a delectable music, and surprise! she has a store of wisdom to impart to the lucky reader. I’d have to go back to Suzanne Doyle’s “My Grandmother’s Visit” to locate in my capacious memory so ambitious and definitive a poem on this particular familial relationship. Before that I’d reach for “Cottage Street, 1951” Richard Wilbur’s great poem for Edna Ward and Ms. Plath. To achieve this high elegiac tone at thirty-four is quite a feat, but it’s something several thirty-somethings are pulling off: Greg Williamson, Diane Thiel, Alicia Stallings, Catherine Tufariello, to name just four besides Reeser. These thirty-somethings are really something.
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