Just released review of Small Worlds Floating~
Blueline, SUNY Potsdam Literary Review, 2017
Small
Worlds Floating. M.J. Iuppa.
Cincinnati, OH: Cherry Grove Collections, 2016.
Reviewed by Nancy Berbrich
“Why do I only get one lifetime? Where
did this lifetime go?” asked Margaret Atwood in March this year when she
accepted a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.
She is not alone in her dismay. All but the very young think about the
shortness of life from time to time. M.J.Iuppa explores this very human push of
life and pull of death in her 2016 poetry collection Small Worlds Floating.
The book begins with the poem, “Early
morning sky, brimming effervesce, eager,” where Iuppa introduces the reader to
the major theme running throughout her book. She writes,
I
stare at myself
in
the picture window’s reflection, slightly
startled
by the ghost of me rising
in
its slippery surface.
Here
she is slightly startled, bumping up against her ghost. I’ve seen my own
distorted image in that
glass, and have turned away, trying to ignore it.
However, this poet stares at it, captures the moment,
the surprise of it, and
compels me to look again. Later in the book, her mortality grows more
palpable. In “Beneath the Black Willow” the poet writes,
Amazing,
amazed
we
look hard at each other,
at
our age
What
year is it?
We
stare at each other
a
swell of sound, cresting
What
year is it?
And, in “This Upheaval of Light,” we experience again the startling
way that mortality sneaks up on us,
So
we pause dumbstruck by
the
hour, like dapple gray horses
…we
can’t
believe
that this is as short lived
as
we are—small motions—
leaves
trembling.
In this collection of more than sixty
lyric poems, Iuppa brings to bear her adept use of the poet’s techniques and
her keen poet’s eye. The cycle of life is everywhere. In this passage from
“Eternity,” we see the poet’s tools and talent at work as she brings images
alive embodying the theme in an observation of nature and its landscape:
The
blistered barn door creaked open a crack
and
blue wasps, with dabs of mud in their mouths,
repaired
the tombs found under eaves.
I
smelled bitterness of basil gone to seed—
watched
the ether of dark clouds crown
in
tender offering—wondered if this could be it.
She uses allusion to deepen and layer
meaning into her poems. These lines from “Looking Back”
loud
as the brass sun breaking
through
the sky’s old plaster, light
falling
like glitter, sparkling
remind me of lines
from Robert Frost’s “Birches”:
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed
crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the
snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep
away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven
had fallen.
The idea of the
swinging pull toward death then back toward life then back toward death is
apparent in both Frost’s poem as well as Iuppa’s collection. And, I couldn’t
help but notice how the poet describes the look of a child waiting at a bus
stop in “To the small child holding a balloon.”
a beat, making the balloon bob
in punctuation above your head,
marking the spot where you are,
with strangers wanting to go home.
This reminded me of
how the delightfully experimental Kurt Vonnegut put an asterisk before the name
of a character who would die before sundown in his 1985 novel, Galápagos.
Insomnia, thoughts of those who have
passed on before, and even the yearning for death as a beautiful rest are
addressed in these poems. All are part of coming to terms with our own looming
mortality. Then there is the regret at the so many things that must be left
undone. Iuppa articulates it in “Awakened, hours before dawn, rain”:
Nightmares flower
in the glacial dark.
Nothing put away,
or finished—the corner
She expresses similar feelings in these lines from
“Interview”:
I wanted to improve what I say
I can see—the last days of winter,
nearly gone in the precision of rain—
Fittingly, “Interview” concludes this fine collection: as
Iuppa explains in the poem, “I work by memory / and struggle to perfect a story
/ beneath a calm surface.” In the hands of a lesser poet, these moments, these
poems could be maudlin, even depressing. But I feel like this poet has put her
arm around me and helped me look and see. She has left me “leaning forward
open-eyed.”
