I’m holding in my hand something new that feels old. You might have found it in an airport in 1962 or a bookstore in 1955. It’s easy to imagine Don Draper gifting it to someone, but it’s from 2015; the poems themselves offer no clues to orient the reader in time and often feel very 20th century in origin.
Moon Full of Moons by Kat Lehmann holds echoes of the confessional poetry of Plath or Sexton and a lot of the magic of cummings. She writes breathless love poems to her children and the moon, rivers and trees. The cycle of moon phases is a recurrent theme, almost to the point of being a narrative but this is poetry and you are welcomed into, rather than pulled along by, a growing knowledge of what she’s up to here.
She’s unfolding a path to recovery from loss of her beloved mother. She’s reveling in every moment of discovery her children make in their path to adulthood and independence. She’s creating something as beautiful and perfect as anything Plath or even Yeats might have given us.
She visits a Victrola aging to decrepitude in one favorite poem and imagines herself as Cycles of Broken Being (sandmirror oceanglass) in another. She is Alive, “Soft breeze brushing bare skin, a steady pull holding me to this spinning roundness” on page 14 and holds up a mirror to much of what anyone might see as beautiful, like seashells, trees and rainbows, in The Language of Beauty on page 104. She finds life and death in Family Photos and plays with the delights of words for their own sake in Languagelessness — “Sensation is a dialect” and The Language of Lines “Wrinkles/ from a smile or scrunched nose” on 27 and 26.
This is a long book of poetry, yes, to be lingered over for days or weeks or a lifetime.
My favorite is Nights of Waxing Crescent, read here by a dear friend…
Listen to nights of waxing crescent by lovefaithreason #np on #SoundCloud
Panoply of Life 