In “Existential Texas,” “sooty careless clouds drift across Texas/like God’s ink blotter” and in “travail,” a tiny chicken coop is a home where, in the end, the “door is closed for now/to the fields beyond.” The simple objects serve as set designs. In “Dune Shack,” for example, a “great ball of sun pasted to the window” shapes the background for two lovers. Throughout the poems, tragedies emerge in scant Beckett-like landscapes, often empty except for a hut or train or field.
#POEMS ABOUT TIDINESS SERIES#
But the collection is not a series of elegies to her mother the poems merge different grief pools, mingling her mother’s death with the loss of her partner, the dissolution of families, the holocaust’s destruction, and the isolation the speaker feels in later life. In Lily is Leaving, Fried’s eponymous subject, “Lily,” is Lillian, her mother, to whom the book is dedicated. (Fried is now Curator of the Alaska Jewish Museum in Anchorage.) She came to poetry later, after her life with Bernstein, and she took to it with both humility and gusto, taking courses at Hugo House, reaching out to other writers and editors, and going back and back to her verse, recalibrating it. For thirty years, she worked in plaster and paint depicting scenery for film and theater. The book displays an authentic and generous submersion into grief, personal history, shared tragedy and longing. Fried, who is Steven Jesse Bernstein’s widow (Bernstein was the poet, punk rock hero and spoken word performer before there was spoken word who died by his own hand thirty years ago this year), began her own arts career as a set designer. Thankfully, we have Lily is Leaving, Leslie Fried’s first poetry collection. Tidiness could transform the poems into granite memorials rather than explorations of loss and sorrow. The idea of reading a collection of elegies, for example, would feel to me like trudging through lines of gravestones. Of course, an artist or poet can overdo formal matters and deaden the emotional experience that they are trying to convey.
I wonder if those who feel that grief proceeds in a step-by-step process are longing for the structure of art and haven’t found it yet. As the only culturally-sanctioned form of madness, it’s never a straight line of events but rather a quarantine inside devastation and magical thinking. Grief has its quiet lulls and its rage-filled tirades it has its disjointed moves, its recurrences, and its counting of the hours. In lies the irony: craft has its confines so that it can liberate its subjects. For sorrowful poems, songs and paintings to relate, they need to be laid out within a structure and left to expand in the minds of viewers and listeners.
If If Children Ruled the World If You Could Only Change One Thing Importance of Stones (The) In a Land Far Away In the Beginning Infinite Wisdom Is It Part of Old Age? It's Hope that Puts Wind in Your Sails It's SO Cool to Say 'No' It's YOUR Choice!! Lamentation on Life's Shortness (A) Learning Our Social Skills Lessons From the Past Let Magic Happen Let There Be Light Let's Celebrate Diversity Let's Make a Noise About Bullying Let Us Out - We're Children! Light in Our World (The) Likes and Dislikes Little Devils' Convention (The) Lives Lost by War Loneliness Man's Inhumanity to Man Make That Change Man Within the Boy (The) Merman Grieves (A) Mindset Mirror's Clear and Truthful (The) Mister B Motivation Matters Move on From the Past Mr Seven 53 My Dream Nightfall - (death) One Kind Little Word On Doing Your Best On the Road Alone On the Sea of Life Open Your Heart Optimist and the Pessimist (The) Paint Me a Picture Paint Me a Picture (2) Parent Power Pastures Green Peace on Earth Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater Poems That You'll Enjoy Poet's Lament (The) Poetry is Powerful Reach Out Remember Remember It's God's World Remember, Reme mber Save Our Jungle Please S ail Your Psychic Seas Sandcas tles at Hope Bay Searching for the.
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