The World as It Is: A Review of Aquamarine by Valerie Duff
The opening poem “Music of the Spheres” prepares the reader for the author’s whirlwind tour through the poet’s outer and inner worlds. The poem also reveals the multiple perspectives of the poet’s physical and emotional sensibilities, her awareness of the glory of life and its tragedies.
On her birthday, in Florence, the poet attends a performance of Bach’s fugue in a church setting. “The organ // shook trains from Venice to Salerno.” When she emerges, she is “an accordion, wondering / how to make a compound sentence.” She wanders “the Museo Galileo’s giant hall / of mechanical devices.” Next, she’s in the Uffizi, “face to face with The Annunciation, // Gothic art of Memmi and Martini.” She does not know which is the angel and which the virgin. Her “heart lifted // to the lily’s bright leaf.” Yet, the poem turns. “The displeased fire lens of her gaze / said so much more is ahead.” She ends:
Then I wept, hardly knowing I was standing
with anyone but the saints, in their exclusive panels,
their stares the still twin eyes of storms.
Prepared by this poem, the reader is next presented with “Biome,” which offers images that contrast the poet’s physical and emotional experiences:
...outside, bumper cars
and sand toys nested in the oyster grass.
Island birds pieced songs from soft white sand
and little tar not far from Three Mile Island,
the guard who held me upside down.
Moving through the first section in this collection, the poet references Lake Louise, Iceland, Virginia, the Wellesley Botanic Gardens, Havana, Bogotá, London. Yet, there is a common thread, that mix of beauty and ugliness in all these poems.
The second section is framed by death. The opening poem, “Flood,” is set in the “Old Burying Ground, Church Street, Cambridge,” which echoes the church of the opening poem, where “The organ // shook trains from Venice to Salerno.” In this poem, the poet begins in the churchyard with “that dirty birch gone hunchback, // where the honey locust scrawls / a jigsaw path.” She references “the settlers who came here first,” but quickly transfers to her “injured father,” to whom she would “promise anything” to “keep our etched plans alive, deny / what misery, then excess we become. Then comes the turn: “Lights change direction, traffic, orbit,” and the poet returns to the “only living man who’s in this scene,” a man who
...lies homeless near these littered
ancient skiffs that wave a semaphore
of nicks made hourglass and death’s head.
The poem, “Reflection,” is deeply lyrical. “We track maples. / Hear the bird-calls.” The “we” of the poem is the poet and the poet’s son.
Still ponds. My son.
You and I are
Spruce fall.
We fit beneath
The dripping canopy...
This poem focuses on the breathless beauty of the world, the “Rain-stripped stumps” that “Reflect the planets // we can’t see.” It ends with the “lowing frogs // And in the pond, the sky.”
The section ends with “Calling,” a memorial poem to Seamus Heaney. The poet recalls her time in Dublin and her first meeting with Heaney: “...you were an elegant / windmill, tufts of white hair a thistle’s / wispy seeds.” This is one of the longer poems, and, in the fourth part of the poem, the poet addresses Heaney, bringing him from his late life “dreaming / Kerry coastlines, lilts of Armagh, / horse chestnuts in the park” to the turn where the park is where he now lies.
In the third section of the collection, the poets continues to explore an eclectic mix of subjects: “Fry’s Spring Filling Station,” “John Kerry’s Concession Speech” (in Faneuil Hall in 2004), “Iceland,” “The Story of the Blue Ridge Mountain Boxwood.” As is fitting for this final section, she includes “Legacy.” She finds children’s books from 1914 that were “packed in a box,” that was a “tidal / pool of tape and glue.” She gives the story of one book, “watermelon pete,” about the theft of a watermelon. The book is “so old,” the poet “hear[s] a train / going somewhere in the distance.” The train and Pete and the watermelon (which Pete returns) intermingle as the poet moves to the disparity between the “old white man” and “Pete,” whose
...kin
till and plow their skin
across the field, pulsing hard
like the train, from the crop
as the old man locks watermelon in his bin.
The poet’s ability to shift from the sentimentality of finding a box of old children’s books to the “legacy” of what that means in society is both subtle and impactful.
The last poem in the collection is “For Sale.” The poet begins “Before I knew what it meant to be / a collector...” She moves from “little wild things” she wants to have “always” to the “moving pyramid” of furniture and porcelain she acquires. But the “always” doesn’t last because she dropped the porcelain, “harvested and swept / shard Lear, shard daughter.” In the end, she “blow[s] the fine-grain kingdom / through [her] fingers,” accepting life as a transient experience. She “won’t change the locks, or fix you up / in case someone comes to the door.” She will be accepted as she is, in the same way as she explores the world.
In this way, Aquamarine delivers a clear view of the world as it is.
Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her book reviews have been accepted by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and others. She earned her MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles in poetry and fiction. Online: https://alinesoules.com