Copper Canyon Press, 2010
\nSoftcover, $15.00<\/p>\n
Reviewed by James Crews<\/p>\n
Every once in a while a book of poetry will fall into your hands and\u2014perhaps not expecting much at first\u2014you read it in one sitting, breathing a sigh of relief that you have discovered a new poet (new to you, at least) whose work actually speaks to you. Such was the case for me with Connie Wanek\u2019s aptly titled On Speaking Terms<\/em>, published a few years ago by Copper Canyon Press. Wanek, a retired librarian from Duluth, Minnesota and 2006 Witter Bynner Fellow, has not garnered as much attention as she should for this lovely book. And she will likely be called a regionalist<\/em>, that label most reviled by many writers. It\u2019s true her settings hew close to the frigid landscapes of the Upper Midwest, but she sees these places, these lakes and rivers, so keenly that her poems trigger deep insights into nature, offering us a new way to look at our relations to the world. At a time when few poets explore the ordinary, Wanek gently reminds us what\u2019s possible with simple, straightforward talk. In \u201cA Sighting,\u201d she writes of the owl spotted during a hike:<\/p>\n He must have just eaten<\/em> and we stood near the chest-high reeds,<\/em> Wanek is a master of recording the quiet moments\u2014what Virginia Woolf called \u201cmoments of being\u201d\u2014but a streak of healthy playfulness also wends its way through many of the poems even when she\u2019s tackling more serious subject matter. \u201cThe Death of My Father\u201d opens unexpectedly:<\/p>\n He died at different times in different places.<\/em> Wanek\u2019s stanzas are elegant yet spare rooms we step willingly into, surprised by what we find there, as in \u201cPickles,\u201d which begins with the line: \u201cI don\u2019t need to say what they look like, do I?\u201d \u201cConfessional Poem\u201d gives us a speaker\u2019s experience as a girl, sharing her \u201cwhite lies\u201d with the priest in a literal confessional, but the poem soon takes a wonderful turn as she confides the things she wishes<\/em> she could have confessed:<\/p>\n a silk cuff missing its button,<\/em> Critics often sound poetry\u2019s death-knell, citing a shrinking, almost non-existent audience and the ever-insular, esoteric nature of today\u2019s verse. Surprise, surprise: Most people would read about lives like their own\u2014what John Updike famously called \u201cthe human news.\u201d Maybe this is why Wanek\u2019s poems (especially when read in winter) feel like such a balm to me; in \u201cFirst Snow,\u201d for instance, she lets us join in on the fun as she performs a lighthearted re-imagination of Genesis:<\/p>\n . . . it was Eve who made<\/em> Some will no doubt say that the poems in On Speaking Terms<\/em> are too simple, that poetry should not be so relatable and pleasurable. They may find off-putting her insistence on turning her gaze toward jelly beans, Scrabble, popcorn and coloring books. These critics will certainly object to her reverence for the everyday. But what else is there? For those poets who aspire toward a wider audience\u2014and for all her quiet ways, Connie Wanek is one of them\u2014and for those who seek to bring the democratic joys of good poetry to readers outside of the academy, these poems are prime examples of the music always available to us when we can simply stop and pay attention. And if we take a look at the work of former U.S. Poet Laureates, or former Nobel Prize winners like Tomas Transtr\u00f6mer, we see that it is their unique ability to make the quotidian seem suddenly extraordinary that endears them to readers worldwide and renders their work enduring.<\/p>\n In \u201cWhite Roads,\u201d we begin to understand perhaps how Wanek trained herself in her youth to see the muted beauty of a single<\/em> place:<\/p>\n I seldom left my world then,<\/em> May there be more so-called \u201cregional poets,\u201d patient enough to bring us books we can care about, poems that care enough about us as an audience to say clearly what they mean, to show us a full world, as Connie Wanek\u2019s On Speaking Terms<\/em> does, without flourish or pretension.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Copper Canyon Press, 2010 Softcover, $15.00 Reviewed by James Crews Every once in a while a book of poetry will fall into your hands and\u2014perhaps not expecting much at first\u2014you read it in one sitting, breathing a sigh of relief that you have discovered a new poet (new to you, at least) whose work actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[19,39],"class_list":["post-455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-connie-wanek","tag-on-speaking-terms"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nsomething that had, itself, just eaten.<\/em>
\nFinally he crossed the swamp and vanished<\/em>
\nas into a new day, hours before us,<\/em><\/p>\n
\nour feet sinking, and felt<\/em>
\nwe\u2019d been dropped suddenly from midair<\/em>
\nback into our lives.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nIn Wales he died tomorrow,<\/em>
\nwhich doesn\u2019t mean his death was preventable. <\/em>
\nIt had been coming for years,<\/em>
\ncrossing the ocean, the desert, pausing often,<\/em>
\nmoving like water or wind,<\/em>
\nhere turned aside by a stone,<\/em>
\nthen hurried where the way was clear.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nsheer stockings coiled on the floor,<\/em>
\nshoes with heels like wineglass stems\u2014<\/em>
\nthe hypnotic black-and-white images of film noir,<\/em>
\nwherein all eyes followed a bad star<\/em>
\nwith uncontrollable longing.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nthe first snowman, her second sin, and she laughed<\/em>
\nas she rolled up the wet white carpet<\/em>
\nand lifted the wee head into place.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nand little entered it. Too much was close at hand<\/em>
\nto wonder what became of the sun all night,<\/em>
\nthe stars all day.<\/em>
\nOr where the snow went that lay<\/em>
\nso deep upon the roads.<\/em><\/p>\n