The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whose reverence for language and skilled use of it are so evident in his own collections of odes and love poems, shows how a single word can bring people together, how a single word evokes many other images and symbols and memories, and how associations are constructed and signified through language. In his untitled poem, numbered “I” from the section of his 100 Love Sonnets titled “Morning,” Neruda evokes the name of his wife and meditates on “Matilde”in four balanced stanzas. This poem is not Neruda’s most impressive, best known, or even demonstrative of his most powerfully imagistic language, but it is an accurate reflection of just how keen a sense of words and their value Neruda possessed, and how words can link people together. A similar reverence for words—and the acknowledgment of how difficult it can be to find and speak them– are conveyed in Mary Oliver’s powerful poem, “Praying.” Oliver, a close observer of the natural world, of the quotidian, of the ordinary elevated to the extraordinary, tells her reader to claim the power of language by “just… patch[ing]/ a few words together” (ll. 4-6). She makes that patchwork seem deceptively effortless, and is encouraging to the reader, deliberately instructing him or her to not try to “make them elaborate” (l. 7). Oliver closing lines suggest that by claiming the power of words and expressing one’s appreciation for them, one can even come close to communicating with God.
Words, once found, may be difficult to hold onto, and the language of loss is also represented in this collection. Such a feeling is conveyed by Raymond Carver in his poem, “Letter.” In his all-too-short life, Carver wrote a lot about words, but in “Letter,” he seems to suggest how easy it is to forget words that were once important to us. The sudden memory of a single phrase, “dirty and caked with grime,” compelled Carver to ask his partner, the poet Tess Gallagher, to go in search of a notebook, or maybe even “a few lines scribbled on some scraps/of paper” (ll. 5-6). He wants Gallagher to find the words to “see what else I noted from all I heard,” to “see if it’s possible to recreate” a scene which only ever really existed in his own imagination, built upon the foundation of a real event. In the larger scheme of things, the scene Carver wants to evoke is not very important; however, the note he made and his powerful memory of it seem to affirm that even the smallest details are worth remembering, recovering, and putting into words. Carver’s poem hints at the synergy that comes to exist between the writer and the reader, the speaker and the listener, but Grace Paley’s poem explores this relationship directly. The poem is not an easy read, even a strange one, that bears multiple readings to yield clear meaning, but Paley ultimately conveys that words are testimonies of our experiences, and testimonies require both a listener and a speaker.
The final poem in this collection performs a fitting finish. Naomi Shihab Nye often structures her poems around a single word, playing with its meaning by creating metaphors and similes that explain what the word alone may not be able to say. In fact, in “Adios,” Nye never says what “adios” means, defending her staunch commitment to “Explain little” because “the word explains itself” (l. 26). Nye’s poem, as is true of the others in this collection, is technically skilled and structurally tight, but it is in the close eye for detail and the insistence that words matter that Nye and her companions in this volume really perform their poetic duty.
This, then, is the theme of For the Love of Words. The world may already be full of anthologies, but in this volume, you are sure to find eight poems by eight poets who know what words are capable of doing. The reader of this particular poetry anthology should not and is not meant to feel locked into a particular “mood” as he or she might be with other collections centered around one theme or idea. With that said, more than the products of the poems themselves—each of which is stunning—the poets are entirely conscious of the poetic process, of the construction of language, the architecture upon which we build the relationships of our lives. The poems collected here are all gathered here simply because of a peculiar and outstanding resonance of language and if you are someone who loves words and what they can do, then these poems will resonate within you, and you will find yourself at the bookshelf time and again, returning to these poems.
Bibliography
Carver, Raymond. “Letter.” In A New Path to the Waterfall. (73-74). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.
Krysl, Marilyn. “Saying Things.” Retrieved on November 16, 2007 from http://www.inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2006/12/294-saying-things-marilyn-krysl.html
Neruda, Pablo. “I” from “Mornings.” Stephen Tapscott, Trans. In 100 Love Sonnets. (7). Austin,TX: University of Texas Press.
Nye, Naomi Shihab. “Adios.” Retrieved on November 16, 2007 from http://weeklypoemproject.blogspot.com/2006/04/adios_23.html
Oliver, Mary. “Praying.” Retrieved on November 16, 2007 from http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Praying.html
Paley, Grace. “A Poem About Storytelling.” In Begin Again: Collected Poems. (11-12). New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2000.
Shange, Ntozake. “Advice.” Florence Howe, Ed. No More Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. (420-421). New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
Stafford, William. “What’s in My Journal.” In The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. (288). St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999.
