The title of Ann Fisher-Wirth’s new volume, Paradise Is Jagged, announces at the outset that the book’s poems will embrace both enchantment and peril, and that readers may expect to encounter within the volume’s pages an admixture of joys and sorrows. Indeed, two poems’ titles—“The Astonishing Light” and “Fraught Season”— underscore the interchange and juxtapositioning of these dual foci. The elegiac and melancholy tone with which many of these poems are imbued is often echoed in the celebratory poems about nature, though they also often contain moments of quiet joy, infusing the poems with glints of light.
Take, for example, the prose poem, “Catalpa,” which honors an ancient and famed tree “older than Columbus” located on the University of Mississippi’s campus, where the poet taught for many years. Fisher-Wirth recalls bringing her students to the tree to encircle it was gratitude and love, then she moves into a consideration of how the catalpa has lived through a chain of momentous historical events:
When I think of the tree as a sapling, my mind enters a great
quiet. Before the Depression, the yellow fever, before the
burning of Oxford, before the University Greys left their
classrooms for the battlefield and died or were wounded to
a man at Pickett’s Charge, and before Princess Hoka of the
Chickasaws set out with her people on the Trail of Tears,
this tree sank its roots deep and deeper into the ground.
Generations moved about beneath its boughs, spoke and
loved and died as it grew.
By following this stanza with a clarifying one-liner: “And here it is, still, in the clattering present,” the poet abruptly brings the reader up to the here and now. However, these days, due to the tree’s increasing frailty, “fences surround it, stakes hold up its branches. No/ longer do art majors loll on the benches and smoke under its/ big-leaf shade.” Yet, despite its great age, “every spring, wet tender leaves unfurl on branches/ jagged as broken bones, and the tree bursts out in a froth of/ white petals.” The catalpa is a living example of fortitude, resilience, and beauty, to which Fisher-Wirth pays tribute so eloquently.
Movingly, this collection brims with odes, homages, elegies, and laments that marry the personal with the universal. I find Fisher-Wirth’s poems about her late sister Jennifer especially affecting for their intimacy, candor, and longing. A recurring movement in these poems is the trajectory from loss and sadness to moments of catharsis or joy, as occurs in the last stanza of “Namesake,” which memorializes both the poet’s sister, and a baby the poet lost:
In my actual, silent family, we never
mentioned my stillborn child.
But when I think of my sister, now dead,
or when I think of the child
whom I did name Jennifer Lisa,
sometimes from the dark
muck of suffering, joy rises
like the lotus flowers
my sister and I beheld
the summer of her last illness,
completely covering the pond where we walked,
white and pale golden above their leaves.
Several other poems addressed to the poet’s sister, including “Komm süber Tod,” “And Behind Us, Only Air,” “Inhabitation,” “Persimmons,” “Letters to My Sister,” and “Thum,” honor her memory with wonderfully specific details and memories of their lives together and apart, and grapple with her death and the poet’s grieving without being maudlin or sentimental. This beautifully articulated final stanza of “Thum” moves skillfully from the deeply personal to the universal with a surprising widening of its purview, as it leans towards the sacred:
The dance of all this dying,
all this grieving,
all this pain, seems to me
like prana moving through us,
like those swaying branches
in midsummer,
Mississippi, where at night
the vast trees throb with cicadas’ silver music.
Another elegiac poem, “Sunday, A Zuihitsu,” embraces a genre of Japanese verse created by the medieval Japanese courtier, Sei Shōnagon. The word “zuihitsu” is commonly translated as “following the brush,” and it’s characterized by a free-flowing and casual style, as if the poet’s gliding a brush across a page. This zuihitsu by Fisher-Wirth takes the form of a prose poem and begins eloquently as an aubade or morning love song, then it moves to memories of her religious “Nebraska-born mother,” and of her idiosyncratic and beloved qualities as an artist, parent, and wife. The poem’s resonant ending is comprised of a night-time dialogue between mother and daughter that ends with the parent poignantly comforting her child who’s had a premonition of death. The zuihitsu’s fluid poetic form, that Fisher-Wirth utilizes in several other poems in this collection, is a perfect vehicle for her wandering or impressionistic ruminations and cascading feelings.
I’m also drawn to several of the book’s poems that confront aging, and which do so with a clear-eyed honesty and bittersweetness. In the poem, “Transformations,” wherein the poet states that “I count my dead/ in the hollow twilight./ Nights, sometimes, I can almost touch them,” she adds in the next stanza:
And now,
this scarred, aging body devouring itself, can I praise my destroyer,
knowing walls, house, great-leaved trees, all those I love,
like myself will vanish?
This evocative lament is especially effective because it’s contained within a love poem addressed both to Fisher-Wirth’s husband and to her own past childhood, for the poet is palpably aware of the transitory and ephemeral nature of every stage of her and our lives. Midway through the poem, she cries out: “Oh my love, my darling, I hunger for your touch...” And in an earlier stanza, she recalls with a tender yearning her girlhood sense of the magical and divine:
When I was small, I swore angels walked
beneath the trees, angels wandered in the garden,
all the dust motes in the window were angels.
Throughout this volume, Fisher-Wirth acknowledges that she “cannot reconcile how the world is sweet,/ how the world is burning,” (from “Wooden Comb”), thus recognizing how fraught our lives are with both countless joys and terrors. She notes the beauty and splendor of the natural world, while also alluding to its ongoing destruction due to climate change and the loss of habitats.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that another motif in this fine collection focuses on injustice in America; several of Fisher-Wirth’s “political” poems artfully and articulately express the poet’s despair over the devastating tolls that slavery and ongoing racism have wreaked everywhere, but perhaps, most apparently to her, close to home in Mississippi. “[A]t the mississippi civil rights museum,” opens with these stark and revelatory lines: “i am reading the names of the lynched when/ the guard asks how i’m doing and i/ start to cry. in one photo, crowds watch/ a body burn, you/ wouldn’t believe their glee as the man is wrapped/ in flame.” The poem continues to catalogue the horrors perpetrated against the Civil Rights Movement: the brutal murders of freedom fighters, the tragic lynching of black people for the slightest social infractions, the “history of suffering, the fire, the/ noose, the/ prison whip called black annie that made scar-lace out of even/ the best looking/ back.”
This poem is addressed to the great, late, contemporary poet, Lucille Clifton, whom Fisher-Wirth met at a reading and reception at the University of Virginia in 1982, and who related there a story about the Virginia hanging of her great-great grandmother. In the poem’s last stanza, Fisher-Wirth gratefully pays homage to Clifton for her courage and kindness “in the midst of so much cruelty, such destruction,” while simultaneously and implicitly thanking her for moving the poet towards activism and a more conscientious awareness of the inequities within our society.
As indicated in later poem’s epigraph, Fisher-Wirth spent a year writing “The Astonishing Light,” and it’s one of my favorite poems in this book, a true tour de force. Its long narrative describes the writing classes and students whom the poet, and her fellow teacher Patrick, encounter at Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary. This is a profoundly moving portrait of the constricted incarcerated lives that these men endure while living in shockingly cramped and unsanitary conditions—men who are often imprisoned for decades, having been sentenced “for no worse/ than what the frat boys on my campus do at parties.”
Fisher-Wirth counters the horrors of America’s past and of its ongoing present, as well as her own personal losses, with several poems that embrace a Buddhist view of the world. In the volume’s final poem, “Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay,” a lovely commemoration of the death and funeral rites of the great Vietnamese monk, peace activist, poet, and teacher of “Engaged Buddhism,” she comes to terms with her own mortality when she concludes:
How could I ever
be afraid of death?
This morning I woke
still wrapped in his blessing, merciful as the rain.
I applaud these introspective, insightful, clear-eyed, memorable, and moving poems which take on the great themes in life and poetry: the passing of time and our inevitable dance with death, love and its permutations, and the enduring resilience we find in nature, and in ourselves.
Maurya Simon’s twelfth volume of poems, The Blue Bridge, is forthcoming in 2025 from Etruscan Press. An earlier volume, La Sirena: A Novella in Verse, appeared in 2024. She’s serves as a Professor of the Graduate Division and a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Riverside, and she’s currently evacuated from the Angeles National Forest in southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains, where a megafire is raging.