Review: ‘Canopy’ by Linda Gregerson

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The syntax that develops towards Gregerson’s tragic ending does the articulated work that other poets can do with pure tones: Few living poets do English grammar this well. (If you’re looking for a change in style after Gregerson’s new and chosen “Prodigal,” stop looking: It’s at its best right now, but its approach to language hasn’t changed.) Two poems called “Love Poem” open in the same way, then look at a painting of a changed or corrupted painting. on: “Once, my most beautiful darling, the sea/land was all one mass/and the light was mixed and/could not find a place to rest.” The first poem addresses the poet’s two daughters, “Emma”, the second “Megan”. Both poems commemorate the poet’s sister, make individual grief seem eternal, and are fond of a person – or is it motherhood? — the tendency to put ourselves in charge of everything: “What you love/is not ruined because of you?” At that time, when prose required a question mark, the poet gives his own answer: We are destroying everything.

If this answer seems exaggerated, so does the news from Antarctica and Flint: “Teething baby, bits of paint. Water running from old pipes/living pipes” and very American “science-it will fix it, someone-somewhere-/someone Other successful poets of middle and old age—Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, perhaps David Baker—followed grief with similar authority, but none with such reliance on the grammatical resources that poetry shares with complex prose, Midwestern The consequences that other poets might have left for us to piece together are precisely shaped, adjusted to our time. On family separation at the U.S. border, “This is horrendous in the way it-means/works-in-the-world. “It’s not a breakout,” she says. “It’s always/as it is (you can see this on/on their face) and it always will be. Their eyes are going straight.”

Such heavy lines dare to prove the people of the future wrong. Although Gregerson says, “I’m here for the praise,” he knows too much to praise with ease. Aware of the news of family separation, melting ice, and preventable deaths as government policy, she deliberately follows the lines “the link between health and loneliness blinded by sunlight”, to our “willingness to believe there is someone else in the world”. recharging.” Gregerson (who teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) a Renaissance literature scholar as well as an eminent poet currently puts his knowledge of the European past into close contact with American history and the present: Once the “Michigan woods” were occupied by unsustainable timber. was not robbed”, but that was a century ago and even now “In Basel, it lies on a linden panel/definitely not resurrected/Jesus body/in a coffin/frame.”

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