The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney

a book review for Amazon that Amazon won’t accept, so far, because it won’t accept my password.

As I read the 22 poems in JoAnne Growney’s Angles of Light (all but two a page in length), I quickly became aware of the wide range of subject matter they cover.  The two poems facing each other on pages 12 and 13 are excellent examples of this.  One, “Can A Mathematician See Red?” is about the mathematical representation of objects, and more “unemotionally” abstract than that it would be hard to get; the other; “Keeping Watch,” concerns a woman visiting her hospitalized mother, and gets about as emotionally unmathematical as you can get as it plumbs the depths of a complex human relationship.

In “Can a Mathematician See Red,” the poet considers a sphere “whose points seen outside/ are the very same points/ insiders see.”  If red paint is spilled over this sphere, what color, the poet wonders, would the sphere’s interior be.  Red?  A mathematician’s answer, the poet tells us, would be, “No,/ the layer of paint/ forms a new sphere/ that is outside the outside/ and not a bit inside.”  Conclusion: “A mathematician/ sees the world/ as she defines it.”  But, she continues, “A poet/ sees red/ inside.”

Among the many things I like about this poem is its crisp contrast of mathematical reality with physical reality, an immaterial sphere with something able to take a coat of paint.  It brings to life the magnitude of the most genuinely real world, which I take to be the physical world, with the mathematical world enmeshed in it, but perceptible only to asensual cognition.  Even more, I love the way it provokes follow-up questions–at least from intellectual types like me–such as whether it would be possible to paint a mathematical sphere–as opposed to a glass sphere, say, which is emulating a mathematical sphere.  In other words, it put me back in Athens with Socrates and Plato. . . .

Except for “Horizon,” which compares the universe before darkness was created, and ends, “Divided/ into complexity/ Eden disappears,” the other poems in the collection are concern people, or landscapes, rather than ideas, so do not require the specialized taste to appreciate that “Horizon” and “Can a Mathematician See Red?” may.

Not that they aren’t equally penetratingly thoughtful.  In “Keeping Watch,” which concerns a visit to the mother’s hospital bed by the poet, for  example, Growney movingly captures in a minimum of words the kind of person (considerate, courageous) her mother is, and wholly captures the love/opposition she feels for her, a woman able to bear her pain “because her Christian Faith/ holds Paradise against my dark resistance/ to believe in Hell or Christ.”

This poem, incidentally, is a near-sonnet, like three other poems in the collection–that is, it pretty much adheres to sonnet-form except near-rhyming or not rhyming more than traditionally rhyming,  In general, Growney’s poems intriguingly skitter between technical formality and supple free verse.

“Thoughtful,” a word I’ve already used for them, may be the best adjective to describe the bulk of poems in this collection.   With “wry” a close second.  Take, for example,

9 syllables

Mock feelings
serve as well
as true ones.

Or:

11 Syllables

Obedience covers
with a thin  layer.

The poet’s mother, according to the first poem in the book, “Write from the Beginning,” is a woman “who cries/ when she’s happy, who talks fast/ when she’s tired, who acts silly/ when she’s sad is a central subject of Growney’s poems.  In “Present Tense,” Growney describes her as “a terrifying/ woman.  She eats anything./ I dreamed when the sun rose/ she’d be a brick wall.// She is.”  Her mother is in “Stories,” too, along with her father and her childhood on the family farm.  She “loved God and Esther Williams” after her husband died, “Symmetry” tells us.  The farm is the setting of “Things to Count On.”  At its end, Growney writes that her “mother’s a good woman, worth three good women.  For sixty years everyone has thought so, and more than a hundred have said.  I’ve stopped counting.”  The final poem about Growney’s mother is the one already discussed, “Keeping Watch.”

Several of the poems have to do with love–“Today at the Grocery Store I met the Man I Loved,” for instance–which ends, “In the grocery aisle, we spoke of the weather/ in our separate parts.  Floods and storms/ have abated.  Nothing separates our hearts.”  A few landscapes make it into the collection, snow, a night sky–and in the last poem in the book, its longest, “Three times the size of Texas,/ Alaska–with fewer living species/ and fewer miles of paved roads/ than Rhode Island.”

This poet clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot more.

Bob Grumman

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 6:48 PM and is filed under JoAnne Growney, Linguexpressive Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Beyond Reason Reasonable

I ended a previous review of JoAnne Growney’s poetry with the
observation that she “clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot
more.”  I was referring to her fine “Can A Mathematician See
Red?” which is also in her latest collection, Red Has No Reason,
for it is a 79-page selected poems (available at Amazon), with most
of the best poems from previous collections (many of them
revised) as well as new ones.  Red, and other colors, are important
for Growney again, as in her “April,” in which a “woodpecker
drums indigo into the poet’s blue days,” but she moves (with green
steps) through the colors, finally to “yield to the rainbow’s red
ending.”

Growney’s poems celebrate many such “red endings,” as when, in
“Exercise,” her persona jogs around a warm-up track for harness
racers, then into city streets where, oblivious of bystanders’ stares,
and cars honking at her, she loses herself in regions “where words
draft/ themselves into swinging, ringing bells.”  Most important to
her, though, is not the beauty of colors, however important that
indeed is, but that they are beyond reason. Her forte, that is, may be
the unreasonablenesses truer than truth she surprises her readers
with–like the setting of her protagonist’s stroll in “Like a Cat,”
whose sky is “a creature as alive as rocks/ but not so warm.”  Or
like the whole of “Stress Remedy”:

From the barn
bring the cow
to your living room rug.
Sleep
when the cow sleeps.

On your porch
watch the ant
do a task seven times.
Quit
before the ant quits.

Walk out
to the field
where wild mustard waves.
Spend
that gold right away.

Only when I read her “Running,” which she describes as a response
to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” ” did I realize that Roethke
is a key influence on her, albeit fully absorbed and re-created.  A
villanelle, like Roethke’s poem, “Running,” builds its self-portrait
with “My sleep is brief.  I rise to run again” and “I live by going
faster than I can,” Roethke’s builds its with “I wake to sleep, and
take my waking slow,” and “I learn by going where I have to go.”
Two beautifully executed formal poems, the later one with the
added richness of its connection to a portion of poetry’s best past.

Less direct but still potent is the connection of such poems of
Growney’s as “Stress Remedy” to the inspired babble of such
poems of Roethke’s as “Where Knock is Open Wide,” which
begins, “A kitten can/ Bite with his feet;/ Papa and Mama/ Have
more teeth.// Sit and play/ under the rocker/ Until the cows/ All
have puppies.”

I thought at times, too, of Emily Dickinson while reading this
collection: the wry sudden twists of thought or wording.  As in the
strangely deep wisdom of:

14 Syllables

A hen lays eggs,
one by one;
the way you
count life
is life.

Growney has Dickinson’s interest in religion, too–but is much
more relaxed about it. Take, for instance:

I Don’t Know Much about Gods

but they don’t live in houses brightly painted
on narrow streets in small towns and don’t
celebrate the ordinary as I do and my friends.

I doubt Paradise.  I see mostly what is small
and not too far away, dislike to start
new things, will build on old foundations.

No river runs in me, no sea surrounds.
My corner is a tidy garden plot.
I plant and nourish, pick the crop–

with care I cook, enjoy my fare, wash up,
and sleep to rise another day.  Gods should
introduce themselves to girls like me.

What could be more Dickinsonian than the flat, “I doubt Paradise.”
I find Growney’s last sentence funnier than anything I remember of
Dickinson’s, though.  Such a mordant “polite” turn on almost every
skeptic’s wonder about why God, if He exists, refuses to show
himself.

Canny observations are one of Growney’s strengths, and self-
revelation–concerning situations most of us find ourselves in, but
also in mathematical ones rare in poetry, and therefore especially
appreciated, too.  This passage from her “A Taste of Mathematics”
particularly appeals to me: “Hot peppers/ are like mathematics–/
with strong flavor/ that takes over/ what they enter,.”  A wonderful
simile out of ordinary sensual life to capture the hold mathematics
can have on those in love with it–as well the magically (beyond-
reason) number-infused Universe, itself.

I don’t feel I’ve come close to doing full justice to this collection.  I
hope my comments have been at least preliminarily useful.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under JoAnne Growney, Linguexpressive Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Beyond Reason Reasonable

I ended a previous review of JoAnne Growney’s poetry with the
observation that she “clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot
more.”  I was referring to her fine “Can A Mathematician See
Red?” which is also in her latest collection, Red Has No Reason,
for it is a 79-page selected poems (available at Amazon), with most
of the best poems from previous collections (many of them
revised) as well as new ones.  Red, and other colors, are important
for Growney again, as in her “April,” in which a “woodpecker
drums indigo into the poet’s blue days,” but she moves (with green
steps) through the colors, finally to “yield to the rainbow’s red
ending.”

Growney’s poems celebrate many such “red endings,” as when, in
“Exercise,” her persona jogs around a warm-up track for harness
racers, then into city streets where, oblivious of bystanders’ stares,
and cars honking at her, she loses herself in regions “where words
draft/ themselves into swinging, ringing bells.”  Most important to
her, though, is not the beauty of colors, however important that
indeed is, but that they are beyond reason. Her forte, that is, may be
the unreasonablenesses truer than truth she surprises her readers
with–like the setting of her protagonist’s stroll in “Like a Cat,”
whose sky is “a creature as alive as rocks/ but not so warm.”  Or
like the whole of “Stress Remedy”:

From the barn
bring the cow
to your living room rug.
Sleep
when the cow sleeps.

On your porch
watch the ant
do a task seven times.
Quit
before the ant quits.

Walk out
to the field
where wild mustard waves.
Spend
that gold right away.

Only when I read her “Running,” which she describes as a response
to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” ” did I realize that Roethke
is a key influence on her, albeit fully absorbed and re-created.  A
villanelle, like Roethke’s poem, “Running,” builds its self-portrait
with “My sleep is brief.  I rise to run again” and “I live by going
faster than I can,” Roethke’s builds its with “I wake to sleep, and
take my waking slow,” and “I learn by going where I have to go.”
Two beautifully executed formal poems, the later one with the
added richness of its connection to a portion of poetry’s best past.

Less direct but still potent is the connection of such poems of
Growney’s as “Stress Remedy” to the inspired babble of such
poems of Roethke’s as “Where Knock is Open Wide,” which
begins, “A kitten can/ Bite with his feet;/ Papa and Mama/ Have
more teeth.// Sit and play/ under the rocker/ Until the cows/ All
have puppies.”

I thought at times, too, of Emily Dickinson while reading this
collection: the wry sudden twists of thought or wording.  As in the
strangely deep wisdom of:

14 Syllables

A hen lays eggs,
one by one;
the way you
count life
is life.

Growney has Dickinson’s interest in religion, too–but is much
more relaxed about it. Take, for instance:

I Don’t Know Much about Gods

but they don’t live in houses brightly painted
on narrow streets in small towns and don’t
celebrate the ordinary as I do and my friends.

I doubt Paradise.  I see mostly what is small
and not too far away, dislike to start
new things, will build on old foundations.

No river runs in me, no sea surrounds.
My corner is a tidy garden plot.
I plant and nourish, pick the crop–

with care I cook, enjoy my fare, wash up,
and sleep to rise another day.  Gods should
introduce themselves to girls like me.

What could be more Dickinsonian than the flat, “I doubt Paradise.”
I find Growney’s last sentence funnier than anything I remember of
Dickinson’s, though.  Such a mordant “polite” turn on almost every
skeptic’s wonder about why God, if He exists, refuses to show
himself.

Canny observations are one of Growney’s strengths, and self-
revelation–concerning situations most of us find ourselves in, but
also in mathematical ones rare in poetry, and therefore especially
appreciated, too.  This passage from her “A Taste of Mathematics”
particularly appeals to me: “Hot peppers/ are like mathematics–/
with strong flavor/ that takes over/ what they enter,.”  A wonderful
simile out of ordinary sensual life to capture the hold mathematics
can have on those in love with it–as well the magically (beyond-
reason) number-infused Universe, itself.

I don’t feel I’ve come close to doing full justice to this collection.  I
hope my comments have been at least preliminarily useful.

The Doubled World of JoAnne Growney

a book review for Amazon that Amazon won’t accept, so far, because it won’t accept my password.

As I read the 22 poems in JoAnne Growney’s Angles of Light (all but two a page in length), I quickly became aware of the wide range of subject matter they cover.  The two poems facing each other on pages 12 and 13 are excellent examples of this.  One, “Can A Mathematician See Red?” is about the mathematical representation of objects, and more “unemotionally” abstract than that it would be hard to get; the other; “Keeping Watch,” concerns a woman visiting her hospitalized mother, and gets about as emotionally unmathematical as you can get as it plumbs the depths of a complex human relationship.

In “Can a Mathematician See Red,” the poet considers a sphere “whose points seen outside/ are the very same points/ insiders see.”  If red paint is spilled over this sphere, what color, the poet wonders, would the sphere’s interior be.  Red?  A mathematician’s answer, the poet tells us, would be, “No,/ the layer of paint/ forms a new sphere/ that is outside the outside/ and not a bit inside.”  Conclusion: “A mathematician/ sees the world/ as she defines it.”  But, she continues, “A poet/ sees red/ inside.”

Among the many things I like about this poem is its crisp contrast of mathematical reality with physical reality, an immaterial sphere with something able to take a coat of paint.  It brings to life the magnitude of the most genuinely real world, which I take to be the physical world, with the mathematical world enmeshed in it, but perceptible only to asensual cognition.  Even more, I love the way it provokes follow-up questions–at least from intellectual types like me–such as whether it would be possible to paint a mathematical sphere–as opposed to a glass sphere, say, which is emulating a mathematical sphere.  In other words, it put me back in Athens with Socrates and Plato. . . .

Except for “Horizon,” which compares the universe before darkness was created, and ends, “Divided/ into complexity/ Eden disappears,” the other poems in the collection are concern people, or landscapes, rather than ideas, so do not require the specialized taste to appreciate that “Horizon” and “Can a Mathematician See Red?” may.

Not that they aren’t equally penetratingly thoughtful.  In “Keeping Watch,” which concerns a visit to the mother’s hospital bed by the poet, for  example, Growney movingly captures in a minimum of words the kind of person (considerate, courageous) her mother is, and wholly captures the love/opposition she feels for her, a woman able to bear her pain “because her Christian Faith/ holds Paradise against my dark resistance/ to believe in Hell or Christ.”

This poem, incidentally, is a near-sonnet, like three other poems in the collection–that is, it pretty much adheres to sonnet-form except near-rhyming or not rhyming more than traditionally rhyming,  In general, Growney’s poems intriguingly skitter between technical formality and supple free verse.

“Thoughtful,” a word I’ve already used for them, may be the best adjective to describe the bulk of poems in this collection.   With “wry” a close second.  Take, for example,

9 syllables

Mock feelings
serve as well
as true ones.

Or:

11 Syllables

Obedience covers
with a thin  layer.

The poet’s mother, according to the first poem in the book, “Write from the Beginning,” is a woman “who cries/ when she’s happy, who talks fast/ when she’s tired, who acts silly/ when she’s sad is a central subject of Growney’s poems.  In “Present Tense,” Growney describes her as “a terrifying/ woman.  She eats anything./ I dreamed when the sun rose/ she’d be a brick wall.// She is.”  Her mother is in “Stories,” too, along with her father and her childhood on the family farm.  She “loved God and Esther Williams” after her husband died, “Symmetry” tells us.  The farm is the setting of “Things to Count On.”  At its end, Growney writes that her “mother’s a good woman, worth three good women.  For sixty years everyone has thought so, and more than a hundred have said.  I’ve stopped counting.”  The final poem about Growney’s mother is the one already discussed, “Keeping Watch.”

Several of the poems have to do with love–“Today at the Grocery Store I met the Man I Loved,” for instance–which ends, “In the grocery aisle, we spoke of the weather/ in our separate parts.  Floods and storms/ have abated.  Nothing separates our hearts.”  A few landscapes make it into the collection, snow, a night sky–and in the last poem in the book, its longest, “Three times the size of Texas,/ Alaska–with fewer living species/ and fewer miles of paved roads/ than Rhode Island.”

This poet clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot more.

Bob Grumman