THE WATCHING SKY, Judy Brackett Crowe. Cornerstone Press, Room 486 CCC, 1801 Fourth Avenue, Stevens Point, WI 54481, 2024, 107 pages, paperback, www.uwsp.edu/English/cornerstone
Judy Crowe’s forthcoming The Watching
Sky is a capacious collection, touching on a wide range of subjects with
striking lyrical narrative poems. Mathematics, ornithology, multiple species of
oak trees (including Quercus
lobata and Quercus
suber), Eudora Welty, visual art, Kyiv, syzygy, and scores more arcane
objects and esoteric ideas make their way into a variety of forms. Free-verse,
prose poems, sonnets, contrapuntals, and various nonce forms populate this collection. Writing
within this wide of a bandwidth, lesser poets might fly off into abstractions,
begin repeating themselves or making predictable gestures for lack of diction, but Crowe remains
fresh and challenging in each poem by habituating the concrete, sensorial level
of language, even when pointing toward the ineffable. “Inside the Pearl” is an example that creates multiple
levels of meaning, providing abstract truths within a metaphorical sensibility:
She
swallows the pearl uncultured it
is
so
is she inside the pearl
sleeps
mustard seed or
a babe’s clipped nail or
a
kitten’s
eyelash or
something else alive and
spinning
warm
she walks toward
the
far distant middleness
with
a pebble in
her
shoe she put it there
to
remember always
that
she’s
of this earth
not
of the air
she
cannot fly doesn’t want
to
fly all that air swishing
as
she swings ever higher
toward
the moon
tonight
barely one night
past
full
she
swallows the moon
The remaining lines of this ars
poetica are as emblematic of every poem in The
Watching Sky as is this opening for remaining “of this earth” while pointing “towards the moon,” the poet’s
language having “swallowed”
poetry’s familiar images [i.e. the
moon], allowing in the end, “the pebble, / the spinning night / to save her.” And in
some poems, the poet states this mission outright as in “The Dirt”—“You’ll find the truth in the
dirt / damp black honest dirt / Yes the truth and the lies and the silences /
The orchid begins in green hush needing / no soil and giving up fragrance / for
improbable beauty.” Even when using some abstractions as in this passage, Crowe
gestures toward the lyricism that permeates this collection, always balancing
the abstract with the concrete.
Poems are organized into eight sections that remind this reviewer of
Gustav Freytag’s
narrative progression from introduction (“She” and “Words
and Pictures, Song”); to rising action (“What Matters,”
“The Doing and the
Having Done,” “The Girl,” and “Some
Others”); to the climax (“What
Happens”); and finally, denouement (“This Day Again”).
Most poems from section one (SHE) contain “she” in the first line—“She
swallows the pearl…” “Is she dreaming this life or some other?” “Once on a
long-ago winter’s
day she drew” “The year she had the breakdown” “She can’t hear them falling,” and “She wakes up dreaming, goes through
the day somewhere”—so that by the end of this introductory section, we have
come to know quite a bit about her, as well as the direction this book may
take. “Dreaming Awake” begins
with these lines:
She
wakes up dreaming, goes through the day somewhere
else,
traipses through sleet and wind, cold sun now
and
then, climbs up scree slopes,
over
and around lichen-painted boulders
skyward
to the saint’s aerie,
sheep
and dogs musical notes
in
the fields far below
After a circuitous route that structurally
alternates between narratives including “spread[ing]
cardboard, leaves, woodchips / between berry
rows” and a foreshadow of “berry
scent in the
breeze,”
a walk to Mary Arden’s
farm, a wade through high grasslands, where “a black-haired
boy on
horseback…pleads, / ‘Come
along, I can show you a cavern,” and on and on, interspersed
with stanzas about “turn[ing] pages eyes skimming word ‘through
memory’s
fog / can’t
remember what she’s
read / reads page nine / nine times”—all creating tension both structurally and
ideationally—the poem culminates in this final stanza:
Some
days are like this, forth and back,
neither
there nor here, al confusion, fatigue,
and
desultory verve. What else to do by brew
passionfruit
tea, sigh, pick up the book,
turn
to page ten.
As
within this poem, it is language that drives the organization of the
collection, making for delicious side trips and delightful messiness along the
way. The poet’s
truth often conforms to music, as in the gorgeous poems, among others “Black and Red and Blue on White, 2022,” “Eudora Welty Writes a
Story,” “Listening,” and “Art
& Mathematics” with its concision, repetition, and crafted syntax that
minimizes prepositions, particularly in the latter half of the poem, and in the
title poem, “Watching the Sky” that
effectively utilizes prepositions as repeated anaphora, enacting the first two
lines and lines later in the poem that articulate a “both
/ and” ideation, rather than an “either / or” in a kind of negative capability of
simultaneously holding diametrically opposed ideas
Watching
the Sky
All at once he is no longer young / with his
handful of flowers…
—W.S. Merwin, “Young Man Picking Flowers”
All
at once he is no longer
and
yet he will be always
in
the beginning and in the forgetting
in
the young man picking flowers
frangipani
perhaps whose scent calls up
what’s been
forgotten but not forgotten
and
in his dreams of wood thrushes
of
swallows blackbirds
of
morning sparrows
of
the garden at dawn and the watching sky
he
sees his grandmother watching the sky
and
his mother always looking back wondering
and
he wanders down the small roads
following
the dog following the sounds
hymns
for his father
bells
and bleating dying sheep
the
old voices and the new
wandering
always in wonder
at
the trees without names
at
these green hills
these
sun-hit fields
these
dark mountains on these blessed days
at
the vespers hush in the gloaming
at
the imperfect that remains perfectly imperfect
at
the unfinished that now is finished
In
the “midmorning” of the
book (in section three—WHAT MATTERS—with action rising and tension increasing between the
fulsome present and a future with certain death, a poem appears that is as
musical as any poem in the collection. Read aloud, “One Early-Summer Day, Looking Back” becomes a tutorial
for sound work from the opening to the final stanza, and an analysis of its
images teaches readers how to read Crowe’s work and poets how to “show” rather than “tell.”
What
begins in this first stanza with the opening phrase “Lying on my cot…” reminds one of the famous poem by
James Wright, “Lying
in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” However,
instead of ending with a chicken hawk flying over the farm and the poet’s
reminiscing ending with the realization that his life has been wasted, Crowe’s poem
ends with an awakening to a “red-shouldered
hawk’s
keening…as he gyres up / above the pines and swoops down, his early morning
survey complete,” and the poet’s assessment that “It will be a good day.”
In
this poem, as well as in the entire collection, there is a virtuosic handling
of images that demonstrates a progression and recapitulation of life’s truths
through its various stages from the perspective of early mid-life (“Early-Summer Day”) looking
backwards from the end “After
dinner” to the beginning. These images both celebrate life and give
encouragement to move forward as in this first stanza (“plenty of stars / to follow, and planes and satellites
criss-crossing”), as well as foreshadowing life’s end (“dwindling patch of sky…blotted out
more and more…”). In the remainder of the poem, these images of both life and
death de-intensify as is appropriate for the reversal of the day. In stanza
two, “…an October Glory, her leaves / shimmery-green now, but… / come October,
will wear her glorious red coat.” In stanza three, a cat “yowling when she runs / out of steps, out of sunlight”).
In stanza four, gray squirrels that “strip
/ dead branches from the lindens,” and in the penultimate stanza, tomato plants
with “a few yellowing
leaves.”
One
Early-Summer Day, Looking Back
Lying on my cot on the deck, I scan
my dwindling patch of sky.
It’s shrunk over the years as
the oaks and cedars and pines
have blotted out more and more blue.
Still, there are plenty of stars
to follow, and planes and satellites
criss-crossing. A hawk screeches
from across the creek. A few bats
scurry-fly under the eaves and one
by one settle upside down.
The day quiets and shrivels to
shadows and soft light.
After dinner—arugula and watermelon
salad, balsamic-glazed grilled
chicken breasts, bread and wine—we
hear the usual two deer curl up
on the Shasta daisy bed under the
maple, an October Glory, her leaves
shimmery-green now, but she is
already pulling back sugars and,
come October, will wear her glorious
red coat.
Mid-afternoon,
inside, ceiling fans try to move the air. Alice the old cat
creeps up the stairs with the sun,
one at a time, stretches, and climbs
again, cat-napping her way up the
thirteen steps, yowling when she runs
out of steps, out of sunlight. I
think about where we’ll
plant her, near Fritz,
near Flynn, when she dies. It won’t be
long.
Noontime, the jays and crows—they
are cousins—fluster and chase and
carry on their endless raucous
conversations. Three gray squirrels strip
dead branches from the lindens,
filling their mouths with bark, ends
sticking out every which way looking
like handlebar mustaches
gone wild (nest materials, I
assume), and they scramble and chatter
their way up into the branches of
the tallest linden.
Midmorning, I tidy the tomato plants
that are trying to escape their cages,
tie tendrils to wire, pinch off a
few yellowing leaves, pull weeds
along the berry rows, check the few
hard small nectarines for bird pecks.
This year I swear I’ll get
the fruit before the birds do.
I wake to the red-shouldered hawk’s keening
and watch as he gyres up
above the pines and swoops down, his
early morning survey complete,
to perch atop the bar of the swing
or on a fencepost or on a low branch
of a particular ponderosa. The hawk
has been here every day for a week
or so. He will soon move on. It will
be hot. It will be a good day.
And then Crowe moves on into the remainder of this collection that feels like a “new and selected,” each section seeming like a gathering of best poems from another prize-winning collection, all tied together by craft and voice and tension and resolution and form that enhances and embellishes necessary content. Whether you are a poet or merely a reader of poetry, any day you dip anywhere into Judy Brackett Crowe’s The Watching Sky “…will be a good day.”
Judy Brackett Crowe's stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She has taught Creative Writing, English Literature, and Composition at Sierra College, in Grass Valley, California. She is a member of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.
She believes that the right words in the right places are worth a thousand pictures, and, as other writers have said, she writes to discover what she thinks.
Born in Nebraska, she has lived in the small town of Nevada City, in California's northern Sierra Nevada foothills for many years. She is married to photographer Gene Crowe, and they have 3 children and 4 grandchildren.
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