Inspired by the sea and nature, Cynthia Good’s new lyrical poetry collection is also something of an elegy for her parents. Mostly set in Southern California, the Baja Peninsula, her poems are vivid in imagery and metaphor. In the poem, “A Witness to Solitude,” she writes:
The Mexican almond tree changes its leaves
like a cardigan from green, to freckled,
to copper.
What an enchanting way to describe this natural mutation. Later in the poem she speaks of hearing the leaves of a tropical shrub separating, witnessing its “blood-red eyes open in the thaw of the day.” Such a terrific phrase to pinpoint that moment when the world gradually awakens (“thaws”). It’s an apt title for the book, for despite the passing of her parents and a bruising marriage in the rearview, there’s an optimism in these poems, a sustaining engagement with the world, even in the midst of a hurricane or a wildfire, that’s buoyant and sanguine.
In “After the Hurricane, Witch Moth,” Good notices the modest insect – large enough to span a person’s hand – amid the general havoc of flipped-over chairs, twisted trees and doors ripped from their hinges. “Her wings quavered like violin strings,” Good writes, and she goes on to extol the moth’s bravery, its skill in surviving the storm. She and her dog are
gazing up at this creature
who survived the gale, a life more
evolved, who knew when to stay still.
Elsewhere Good marvels at whales and bats and hummingbirds, snails and the creatures in the vast ocean, saluting each marvelous animal; the hummingbird, for instance, that despite its tiny brain moves with agility in any direction. “They make Instantaneous / course corrections,” she notes in “Lentiformis Mesencephali,”
while my brain, smaller compared
to my body, can’t remember
to close the garage door. One
looks at me and darts off,
a reminder to fill the feeder as
others fly around like sparks,
like a teacher’s scolding finger,
like jewels catching the sun.
In “Whale Anthem” she describes the sounds of the whales beneath the surface of the ocean,
the psalm of sorrow and relief,
someone making love
or dying—the throb of longing,
a sustained heartbeat, maybe
the womb. I couldn’t listen
for long, the expression
of unretrieved emotion,
lovelorn like wolves in a cave
calling the moon. The Om
dissolved into foghorn drone.
But there is also a strong element of grief and regret in Cynthia Good’s poetry. Even in “Whale Anthem” she notes “the same long moan as when / I lost my mother.” In the Thaw of the Day includes more than half a dozen poems about her father, a doctor, and about her mother, an artist, both of whom are no longer living.
Her father taught her to fish. “I never felt more loved than when I’d find // a swordfish a quarter mile out / or hook a tuna / on my own,” Good writes in “Between Long Beach and Catalina.” Her dad would brag about her to his friends, “a pretty girl who could land a fish.” He taught her to be self-reliant. She alludes to this in “What My Father Taught Me” and again in the final poem, “My Dead Father Comes Back as a Brown Bird.” In “My Father’s Father” she compares her own close relationship with her father with his to his own father, both bonds forged at sea, sealed by a “wordless adrenaline,” “the two / of us looking down on the circus of blood and pelicans.”
In the short poem “My Father’s Ashes” she describes the ceremony of tossing his ashes into the ocean (“we give him back to the sea”), and in “El Farallón”, recalling the same event, she describes the waves “as I clocked them
erasing my father, spilling his cinders like down
feathers until he was nothing, yet made of sailboats
and the shimmering sails and pescados he caught—
the pleading fisheye, pouting shark mouth, the sierra
spines and blood that wallpapered his boat.
Good’s mother’s death was also a blow. We read about it in “When Grief Is Not a Gift,” “The Weight of Grief,” “Letter from Summer in LA,” “Hating Me for It,” “Going Down for the Third Time Today” (“in the ICU around all this dying”), “My Mother’s Nudes,” “What’s True” (“We buried my mother’s ashes // We tossed her belongings / into a dumpster”), and most poignantly, in “Total Solar Eclipse, August 21,” set in Atlanta, when she compares herself to the natural phenomenon:
Monday lunges by like this shadow
speeding toward us, like the trial
to erase our vows, like my mother’s
decline. For two minutes and 40
seconds, the moon swallows
the sun. Then we crawl back
into glistering haze.
In “Grief Is Not a Gift,” Good likewise alludes to the death of her mother and the collapse of her marriage occurring in the same five-week span.
There are other poems about the anxieties of everyday life that punctuate our sense of contentment and fulfillment. “Why I Get Anxious Crossing the Street” addresses “irrational” anxieties; “Exploring Hunger in Two Parts” is a poem about youthful body image issues. “Cabo San Lucas, Independence Day” begins, “I’ve become this odd person,” and goes on to describe different anxieties and worries, concluding with the thought that she is “listening
like my life depends on shutting the fuck up,
depends on being voiceless. Like I was
never here, like I am already gone.
Thankfully for us, her distinctive voice is loud and clear, expressing the beauties and perils of existence, the expansiveness and frailty of the human heart. In “When the Waiter Says I Love You” she effortlessly elides from the random human interaction to the comfort of trees, cherry trees, palms, Italian cypress. “It felt // good to hear I love you, though I knew it meant nothing,” she writes.
These trees stand by me, steadfast as I walk thinking
about last night, wondering what would happen if
everyone told a stranger they loved them. Here,
on Washington Avenue a valley oak trunk with the
furrowed face of an old man leans toward me as I go.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, Abby. The two are retired from federal government service. Rammelkamp is the author of several collections of dramatic monologues. A Magician among the Spirits, which borrows its name from magician Harry Houdini’s nonfiction exposé of spiritualism, is the winner of the 2022 Blue Lights poetry prize.