[Rose Kelleher]

Every once in a while, just when I've been grousing impatiently about "boring poems about trees" and other domestic subjects, I'll stumble across something of Rhina's - some brilliant poem that only pretends to be about trees - and have to learn my lesson all over again. It's always a pleasure to be taken to school by her.


[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited November 17, 2008).]

[amacrae]

When I met my girlfriend several years ago at the community college where we both tutored, one of our first conversations was about poetry. A free-verser herself, Rebecca was interested in learning more about the whole "formalist poetry thing" that has been such a major part of my life since college. Well, I knew exactly who she needed to read: Rhina. I ended up lending her three of Rhina's collections that semester, and Rebecca quickly fell in love--with both of us! I recall how she laughed at the condition of the books--each page edged with brown from my thumbs. "My, these books are well-loved!" she exclaimed. They sure are!

Like Roger, "Almost" did it for me. Rhina read that sonnet at Keuka during my junior year, and I've been hooked ever since!

Austin

[A. E. Stallings]

Rhina's poems are always a real discovery to my Spetses students--the idea that durable art can be made from the overlooked materials of the everyday. She makes excellence seem within reach somehow, though, of course, that is, paradoxically, part her extraordinary skill.

This is one of my all-time favorie syllabic poems--I think Rhina has talked about how syllabics seem natural to her from her Spanish background, and how when Anglophones say they can't "hear" syllabics, it is more from our lack of practice. Anyway, I think this is just super. It always makes me want to do more with syllabics, though I don't seem to be able to control them when they get over 5 or 7 syllables per line, as opposed to these sinuous 11's:


CURRENT

Coiled to spring, newly unplugged from the homely
Percolator, you watch me with tense nostril-
eyes that rivet like fangs, your small motionless
head malignant and useful, angry god that
reached for me once in childhood through a hairpin
probing the wall's secrets, sudden and smoother
than sex or whisky, a licking all over
by fire, a rod of ice in the marrow.
And afterward I hid night after night, but
ah, you found me in dreams, flicking your quick tongue
lewdly from the safety of familiar things;
you crouch in my walls; you ripple your braid of
muscle among dark leaves in the mind's garden.


(PS I forget which book this is from!)

[Rose Kelleher]

It's in "Where Horizons Go."

And yes, it's a killer poem.

[Roger Slater]

Another favorite of mine that has the virtue of being short enough for a lazy guy to type out:

Variations

Family faces modulate
like variations on a theme,
so that in chordal passages
the decades shift without a seam,

the living echoing the dead
to dress themselves in borrowed grace.
I like to find my father's look
safe in my son's unwounded face.

Such grave harmonics lend us back
the only paradise we know:
an idle game with time, but still
not bad, as resurrections go.


**

The first six lines are merely superb, but the next two lines crank things up, in my opinion, especially L8 and "unwounded." And the final stanza both justifies and belies the "nicey nice" theory of Rhina's poetry, and I think is typical of the sort of thing you find in Rhina's poems, i.e., an optimism that isn't founded on denial of what makes pessimists pessimists.

[Roger Slater]

And while I'm typing, here's the fifth and final strophe of "Impasse: Glose" -- I should type the whole poem, but I'm too lazy:

What's to be done when every Yes
invites a No, entails a loss?
When saintliness incurs a cross
and certainties earn less and less?
The head works hard to sift the mess,
but since the rest is much less smart
it tends to tilt the apple cart
right back to Adam's tiff with Eve:
she wants to know, he to believe.
And yet they cannot live apart.

[Andrew Frisardi]

I like those poems/stanzas a lot, Bob. What collection are they from? I have only one Espaillat book so far and want to buy others.

[Roger Slater]

Rehearsing Absence

[David Anthony]

Originally posted by Roger Slater:


Variations

Family faces modulate
like variations on a theme,
so that in chordal passages
the decades shift without a seam,

the living echoing the dead
to dress themselves in borrowed grace.
I like to find my father's look
safe in my son's unwounded face.

Such grave harmonics lend us back
the only paradise we know:
an idle game with time, but still
not bad, as resurrections go.

--Lovely poem

[Suzanne Doyle]

Several of these poems of Rhina's are new to me. Clearly I need to collect the complete opus. Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to post them.

One of the many things I admire about Rhina's work, as well as Leslie's, is how they transform the quotidian into the transcendent. Not an original thought; others have noted it too. But I feel compelled to say they are constantly reminding me, look closer, you don't need Apollo to remind you that you're wasting your life.