The pleasures of good poems

In a poem midway through Mark Jarman’s collection The Heronry, a student on a trip abroad (to France?) makes trouble for herself. She loses her passport, skips class, gets drunk, and gets arrested. She’s finally sent back home to her parents, but before she can be put on the plane there’s one final group excursion to a church, where the girl stands behind the altar and sings. “With a voice that glowed,” she sang “her rejection of our rejection.” Her singing “made us / recognize that our desire was being offered back.” It’s a wonderful poem in all kinds of normal poetic ways, and it’s wonderful in its depiction of the capacity of even a troublemaker (“Bad Girl Singing,” as the title has it) to offer everyone around her an unsettling gift. Not to mention there’s something intriguingly eucharistic about the formulation of desire being offered back.

A similar theme is sounded in some of the poems in Tess Taylor’s second book, Work and Days. In “Apple Buttering,” Taylor depicts some people carving the good parts from nearly rotten apples. The rot presumes finitude, and in its last lines the poem makes the passage of time explicit and commands the reader to notice its passing: “As we slice, the day hovers. / Soon it will not.” This sensibility echoes the book’s first poem, “Hung with Snow,” which reads like the English pastoral tradition channeling Bashō. Here it is in its entirety:

Houseman was right:
your life is short.
To miss even this springtime
would be an error.