(Michigan Quarterly Review)

By Carolyn Kizer

Eve, by Annie Finch, was eagerly anticipated, as publishers love to say, but it certainly was, by some old formalists, new formalists, and just plain poets like me. We had been struck by her poems in literary journals and by her anthology, A Formal Feeling Comes. We liked the use of myth in modern contexts; we loved the wild energy held in check by form. In an ecstatic review the poet C.L. Rawlins said, “(Her) rhyme and meter isn’t just a formerly fashionable sort of bondage...but is inst ead a bio-acoustic key to memory and emotion, which existed prior to the written word.” She does indeed abolish linear time: past fables and present events coalesce. Einstein might have accompanied her on his violin. Try this:

Is the sound of my loud carrying life a knell

far across your small ocean? Do you share

the secret that the months keep hidden there?

Is my past-filled pregnancy a hungry shell?

I think I will turn metal, like a bell,

so you can clapper my voice out, to where

the silent memories will echo care

and speak again. We'll sound our double spell,

swinging; we'll swing back then, to forgive

my mother's curve around the angry past—

and then her mother's. They were smothered, bound

and quiet. But we'll speak, and you will live,

tolling and striking what we know at last,

until you ring aloud with newer sounds.

  And we have another shining sonneteer! It’s not that I am partial to this form, but when it all works perfectly, in whatever form, I leap to praise it. And I also praise, without going into pr ecise detail, the way this book is organized. It is all of a piece throughout, so that the individual poems become one poem.

  One of the nine goddesses she celebrates in each section of the book is Saint Brigid. In my standard biography of the saints (alas, after the church has cleaned it up and demythified it) it says of Brigid that she was consistently depicted as "generous and gay, vehement and energetic," an apt description of Ms. Finch. "Eve," her title poem, runs like this:

When mother Eve took the first apple down

from the tree that grew where nature's heart had been

and came tumbling, circling, rosy, into sin,

which goddesses were lost, and which were found?

What spirals moved in pity and unwound

across our mother's body with the spin

of planets lost for us and all her kin?

What serpents curved their mouths into a frown,

but left their bodies twined in us like threads

that lead us back to her? Her presence warms,

and if I follow closely through the maze,

it is to where her remembered reaching spreads

in branching gifts, it is to her reaching arms

that I reach, as if for something near to praise.

  Annie Finch may not be quite as wise and witty as Marie Ponsot, but she is young enough to be her daughter, or mine. Whenever I get discouraged about some trends in contemporary poetry I think of her, a shining light, and I feel better.

--Carolyn Kizer

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch