Every Single Beast of My Heart
Poetry
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026
$17.00, 116 pages ISBN: 978-1-962405-63-8
A poem of just a few lines rarely appeals, being often trite or self-satisfied, but done well it can hit the spot and stick; and in a preliminary reading of Pamela Wax’s Every Single Beast of My Heart I came upon this little gem:
My husband prays I’ll get Alzheimer’s
so when
I forget him I’ll
fall for the stranger
he’s become.
It’s a poem which embeds itself in the psyche and, as I was later to find out, is typical of the general feel of the verse throughout this collection, in that it considers the personal in the light of a sort of tender spirituality.
And to transmit that heightened sense, to make it both readable and relatable, requires an elevated imagination anchored to reality: a combination much in evidence in an engaging and rather touching poem titled “White Birches on the Hopper Trail”. These beautiful trees, these “buff, unadorned sentries” stand blanketed in snow. Among them are some that have fallen, nestling on a bed of moss interspersed with maple and oak leaves. Our narrator, anonymous, alone and cold, seeks comfort alongside these casualties, and in a vaguely anthropomorphic way thinks to lay with one of them to preserve her body heat, and to offer “him” hers. Whether seen as metaphor, or as imperative instinct, we are invited to look on this otherworldly scene as:
this simple love, as the winter
moths, out to feed off the decay, party
around us, fluttering like confetti.
As a counter to the quietude of the above, (and really, no two poems are more different in tone or composition), we must consider the chaos joyfully presented in “A Prayer for Disharmony”. It’s a little rebellion of a poem, Pamela Wax letting off steam, imploring the orchestra to pour:
bubbly from fluted glasses, piccolo
us, horn us, pluck us saxy. Swing signs
and cymbals, vibrato
our steel-stringed bones.
She demands more and more, craving dissonance, tempest, prestissimo. It’s an energetic plea to escape the reasoned rigidity of the everyday, the weight of responsibility.
Such a distraction, alongside some fine lyrical poems, are welcome in a collection consisting largely of poetry of a quietly philosophical bent; but all are constructed with an assured skill and approached with what might be termed a considered kindliness. As an ordained Rabbi, Pamela Wax has all the tools at hand to tackle the more difficult phases of life, including the inescapable problems of aging and its inevitable conclusion, and Wax offers us some particularly well-composed examples here. Overall, this is an accomplished collection of poetry with serious intent, its meaning whispered rather than proclaimed.
It must have been incredibly difficult for the poet to write of the death of her brother by his own hand. In “frog poem”, one of several touching on this appalling event, we encounter a deeply affecting piece whose conceit is beautifully, if tragically, drawn. She is mentally exhausted by memory, tortured by self-recrimination and seeks to move on. She can’t, of course; she can only deflect such hurt by representing herself as a glistening cold-water vertebrate, “... a well-camouflaged / creature who packs ultrasonic cries / inaudible to human ears ...” But she knows, and we know, the fragility of such a stance: it’s a frog facing extinction. I’ve returned to this poem several times since, and can only wonder at the level of distress so skillfully held back here. As a kind of coda, I’ll quote from the first three lines of a separate prose poem which perhaps gives some sort of context:
My brother’s madness spun faster than mine, something with
vortex. He said I was normal, like the setting on his Maytag.
No agitation, he winked, no pearl ...
I was much impressed by a curious consideration of mortality occasioned by fishing out the bodies of nocturnal creatures from a friend’s pool prior to swimming; intrigued by a gloriously weird love poem revealing the personal eccentricities of a late middle age couple; and charmed by a delightful poem about a male finch calling to his mate with the comprehensively descriptive title “The divo who stole the Tanglewood performance on a Sunday afternoon in July”.
A decent poet will always throw in a slightly cranky poem to leaven a collection, and I found just the thing in a piece addressing the narrator’s facial hair, of all things. After describing her many and various attempts to tame, if not to slay it, she wonders what might become of it when she is dozing in some nursing home; asking of this unlovely growth:
...who will tend to you,
my pretties, my offspring – grey
and wiry, virile and resilient – tendrilling
your way to eternity?
It’s a lightish poem touched by an air of resignation which, allied with a dry humour.
But if I was forced to take only one poem from this impressive collection, it would have to be “Prokofiev’s First Violin Sonata”. It’s an utterly compelling piece telling of a friend’s playing of this haunting music, summoning her own despair to align with that of the composer’s. You picture her, with the instrument anchored under her chin, releasing into the crowded hall a cry of sorrow expressed in “the slithering scales like wind / in a graveyard.” In a quietly powerful fourteen lines, the poet addresses both a personal and universal grief in focussing on the performance of one musician’s interpretation of a piece of music, shaping and amplifying to her own taste the notes of a score “steeped in the gore of gulags / and wet kisses from Judas...”. Simply told without artifice or hyperbole, it merely seeks to project a moment in time that transcends the ordinary.
And that reaching out beyond the boundaries is the very essence of Pamela Wax’s offering here: sixty-odd poems in five sections, each of which is gently persuasive and finely crafted by this talented and experienced poet. Every Single Beast of My Heart is an invitation and a challenge to walk amongst both the nettles, and the nettle flower, the other side of the billboard. You would be wise to follow her there.