I also read further in The Best American Poetry 2020. The first poem I read in this batch, "After," by Christopher Kempf, was perhaps the most powerful. It starts out with a description of post-conflict reconciliation (a little awkward, a little staged) that seems like it could apply to more recent conflicts, then adds details and tercets making clear this poem is set during Reconstruction, after the American Civil war. And it is hopeful--it doesn't paint a post-war utopia, but it's set before the height of Jim Crow backlash--with an implicit hope for history to bend again toward justice today.
After,
the orchards flowered. The fields
breathed out, like a lung. What
expectation. After,
... The president
was alive still. Sherman
hacked the rice coast into acreage. As in
forty, with a mule. Imagine. After,
black sheriffs. After, Easter
as emptied shackles. After,
at supper, the McDonoughs
of central Pennsylvania looked up
& watched their sheepdog--gone
two months, a minie bal
bedded in her foreleg--resplendent
as fable on the porch stesp. The moral--America,
good puppy. ....
Longstreet--Lee's
hand at Gettysburg, conductor,
after, of black militias
in New Orleans--led them,
armed, against a White League
one would recognize. For which,
afterward, no statues
were erected. After, ...
Yusuf Komunyaaka's "The Jungle" joins previous poems in the collection (Johnson's "Fifteen," Jollimore's, "The Garden of Earthly Delights") in focusing on the impact of a particular visual artwork, here a painting by Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. "I feel that Wifredo Lam's surrealism has chosen me," Komunyaaka writes in his contributor note.
Shara Lessley's "On Faith" uses repetition very much in a "Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night" mode; she begins, "There is no map for how the apples fall." Steven Kleinman's "Bear" seems sometimes human, sometime not; the poem meditates on mortality ("...did he die/a dignified death, do any of us?"). Nick Lantz' poem addresses mortality and the ephemerality of sound, gaining heft when read in the context of its title, "After a Transcript of the Final Voicemails of 9/11 Victims." He writes that he originally intended to use excerpts from the transcript "but very quickly [he] decided this method felt cheap and flat, so [he] tried to be more associational." In "Quasida to the Statue of Sappho in Mytilini," Khaled Mattawa, whose translation work I admire, juxtaposes the classical art (even if a little clunky) of the statue, evoking Sappho as both poet and exile, with the contemporary refugee crisis, highlighting a situation I was only slightly aware of.
There's a lyricism to Jennifer Militello's love poem, "The Punishment of One Is the Love Song of Another": "...When my past hissed/with cobras, you let me sleep. When/ I was falling, you brought the ground closer/ and made gravity of flowers like a kiss.." (It's a complicated love.) In "Night of the Living," Susan Leslie Moore writes of the constellations and our place in the universe (after downloading, she reveals in her contributor note, a skytracking app). The tiny lines of Cate Lycurgus' "Locomotion" evoke the spinal cord as she writes on injury and connection to the body. Jennifer L. Knox's "The Gift" begins with a bird's pinfeathers but captures the complicated love, dependence, and resentment between a mother and daughter. In "When I Feel A Whoop Comin' On," Steven Leyva tells a story from his own boyhood. In his note, he writes, "Perhaps we spend our whole lives learning and unlearning the poetics of middle school dances."
Also, I have been super distracted while typing hoping for a visit from a rose-breasted grosbeak. Momma had one at her house yesterday. No sign here so far; I should content myself with my active woodpeckers, titmice, cardinals, and thrashers ...
