x y z & &
Pattie
McCarthy. Ahsahta Press, $12 US paperback (50p) ISBN 978-1-934103-55-5
& to & such a pretty bird. this
is
the first sonnet for the third baby. if
I sound prepared for that, I am not.
let me know you’re all right in there,
would you?
Kevin says : I dreamt it was a boy.
my brother says : your favorite
presidents
cannot be F D R & Jefferson—
that’s illogical. Emmett says : when I
was pregnant with you, that was a tough
week too.
Asher says : seashell, voilà. & the third
(having outgrown a perfect, fragile
world)
baby ( bird
from brid OE from unknown
origin) “because he was crying
I like him most of all,” says my son.
And
so opens Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s new chapbook, x y z & & (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015). McCarthy is the
author of four trade poetry collections, most recently Nulls (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2014), as well as a
handful of poetry chapbooks, and her x y z
& & is a suite of thirty-three pages that explores and extends her
work in collage and accumulation, stitching together scattered notes on
parenting, language, nursing, childbirth and babies. McCarthy magnificently
articulates the anxiety, distraction, exhaustion and bliss of parenting small
children, as she writes: “I had four hours in a row alone / to work & I
looked at photos of them / & remembered the limitless mistakes / it was
possible to make with the piano.” In an interview recently over at Touch the Donkey, she briefly discusses
the chapbook:
I have a
chapbook called ‘x y z &&’ coming out in the fall (Ahsahta Press)—it’s
a sonnet sequence I wrote after my third child was born (I wrote a sonnet
sequence after each child was born). One of the epigraphs is from Anselm
Berrigan’s poem “Looking through a slant of light” : “Sending his mother to the
typewriter / To type a poem that would embarrass him / Years later.” That’s my
preemptive action on this front.
There are things
related to the children that I do not write about because they are invasions of
privacy, sure. It was harder when they were infants/toddlers because it doesn’t
seem as though they have privacy when they are so little – it doesn’t feel like
I have privacy during that phase either.
[…]
Obviously, I
think they are brilliant & funny & clever—it would be impossible to
resist them getting in the text.
There
is quite a stretch of poets writing on and around the domestic in intriguing
ways, allowing the small and smaller details of home and children as material
for a language-driven writing, from Canadian poet Margaret Christakos, to
American poets such as Dan Thomas-Glass, Julie Carr, Rachel Zucker and Farid
Matuk, who’s chapbook My Daughter La
Chola (2013) also appeared with Ahsahta Press. Given that home and children
are so much a part of the days of certain writers, it seems almost impossible
to not wonder why more poets don’t include such details in their own work.
McCarthy’s x y z & & provides
material beyond the ends of the standard alphabet and into every parents’
movement into new and unfamiliar territory, writing the confusion, exploration
and small and large discoveries beautifully, including two poems on the
sometimes exhaustive and all-encompassing stretches of nursing: “milk fever
cluster feeding witching hour / cluster feeding milk fever witching hour /
witching hour milk fever cluster feeding / witching hour cluster feeding milk
fever.” Anyone with a newborn, who is also interested in the language of great
poetry, should be reading this. Or should I say: everyone. And the structure of
untitled poems composed as a suite also means it is possible to begin on any
page, and read in either direction.
aren’t children little pears &
observant
birds. dear Fionnuala & your two
little
sharp teeth : what’s great about the
quiet car :
the businessmen read the paper on paper.
I’m wearing wellies & wellie-warers
I’ll spend almost $8 on coffee
while at work—
(I miss the baby)
in physics, a daughter is a nuclide
formed by the radioactive decay
of another. of course, mother rhymes with
another. but this is
just too meta-
& silly & loaded for me. pinion
on the clean fin clear clear wave
we remain open, persons in process.
(2015)
Purchase
x y z & & HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan
currently lives in Ottawa. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry,
fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the
Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for
the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac
press, 2014, The Uncertainty Principle:
stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we
are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs
above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview),
seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds),
Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com) and the
Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the
2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of
Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
