Two Collections from The Laurel Poetry Collective

Diamonds on the Back of a Snake
by Pam Wynn
Laurel Poetry Collective, 2004

Once a World
by Yvette Nelson
Laurel Poetry Collective, 2003

Reviewed by Kathleen L. Housley

Diamonds on the Back of a Snake is a metaphor for Pam Wynn’s experience of life, in which depression and illness are shot through with insight into wholeness and grace. The diamonds are beautiful, but the snake is dangerous. It crawls on the shoulder “on the endless road to heaven.” The snake appears repeatedly in this collection. The poem Legacy is about a mother’s fear of snakes passed on to the daughter. In “Cleaning House,” the vacuum cleaner is a dirt-sucking snake coiled at her feet. Other animals are equally dangerous: her epileptic seizures are like shark attacks. Beetles carry a deadly fungus from elm to elm. Yet for all this darkness and dread, Wynn catches glimpses of redemption, pure and shining. In the poem “Waiting,” she senses it in her neighbor who spends most of her time in the garden.

She does little more than sing with the orioles, and check
On the bees who methodically work her patch of lilies.
She eavesdrops on red maple leaves whispering their
Secrets. Tell me. What was it the crocus said to her
About the mystery of resurrection?

These are beautiful images made more so by word choice: the neighbor is like a beneficent overseer who checks on the methodical bees. She “eavesdrops” on the maple. She has conversations with the crocus, the first flower to appear after winter. With palpable longing, expressed by the two-word command “Tell me,” Wynn wonders what it is the neighbor knows about resurrection.

The honesty and vulnerability of Wynn’s poetry is heightened by her skills as a poet. She doesn’t push her metaphors too far. Instead she uses them to reach new levels of understanding. For example, in the poem “Conch Shell on a Suburban Fireplace Mantel,” she compares herself to the empty, useless shell. She ends by asking to be thrown back into the sea where she could be “a portable dwelling for a hermit crab,” and in that way take on life once again. The reader can only conclude that the little scavenging hermit crab alive in the dead shell is Wynn’s gift of poetry.

*    *   *

Some books of poetry are more than the sum of their parts. In Once a World by Yvette Nelson, each poem is graciously complete in and of itself, but when all the poems are read at once, the impression made on the reader is far greater than normal math (if normal math ever applied in such situations) would indicate it should be.

Nelson writes of the prairie: wind-swept, lonely and lovely even when snow-covered. She writes of the inter-generational love of her family that is rooted in the grass-covered loam. Even Nelson’s ghosts are kind. In the poem “Ghosts,” “the ghost of snow intends no harm and tries always to be beautiful. The family ghost stirs slow oatmeal and adds brown sugar on hard mornings.”

Some of her best poems are imagist in style, reminiscent of Wallace Stevens. The following, “Kindness,” is a good example, combining a photographic sensitivity to landscape that is brought into focus by a small human detail, providing a sense of deep time.

From a church deep
in summer fields
you might see
a new version
of the world
through the window
someone
was kind enough
to prop open
with a worn hymnal.

A teacher and editor for 40 years, Nelson spent a nine-year “sojourn” (her word) with the Sisters of St. Joseph. She now lives in Minneapolis, but it is clear that her real home is the prairie -- a place where the soul can spread out under the eye of a benevolent God.

Kathleen L. Housley has written poetry and articles for numerous journals including Woman’s Art Journal, New England Quarterly,The Christian Century, and Image. An Affiliated Scholar at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, her area of concentration is the interconnection of religion and American culture. Housley’s first book, The Letter Kills But the Spirit Gives Life, explores the lives of five nineteenth-century suffragists, one of whom translated the Bible and had it printed by Mark Twain’s publishing company as part of her battle to prove the intellectual capability of women. Housley’s most recent book, Emily Hall Tremaine: Collector on the Cusp, is available  from University Press of New England. Tremaine, a famous art patron, was a Christian Scientist whose interest in abstraction was based on her belief in non-duality.

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