Promises to Keep: A Review of Debra Kaufman's "The Next Moment"

Promises to Keep: A Review of Debra Kaufman’s The Next Moment

The Next Moment, Poems by Debra Kaufman
Jacar Press, 2010, 64 pages, $13.95
ISBN: 9780984574025

What keeps us alive, motivates us, makes us human are our relationships and the obligations they entail. Frost knew that and memorably expressed it in his lines:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.

Now, in The Next Moment, Debra Kaufman reminds us of the vitality of those relationships as well as the sometimes overwhelming difficulty of them.

Ranging across relationships with grandparents (“Knitting”), parents (“Smile”), spouses (“Nice”), and children (“The Drought Speaks”), Kaufman creates a detailed and honest “atlas of the difficult world” (thank you, Adrienne Rich) that defines who we are, who we have always been, as human beings. And Kaufman goes on to remind us in other poems that when, through such things as death, maturation, and divorce, those relationships seem to fade from prominence, the ever-present relationship with ourselves remains (“Epiphany”), and those other relationships always inherently linger there (“Last Words”), a fact made clearest in these lines from “Hope and Despair Are Not Opposites”:

The body experiences one moment,
then the next,
is always in the present,
while the mind spins into the future
or loops back to the past.

This duality of human existence is treated again both stylistically and thematically in the collection’s two best poems: “Minestrone, Rainy Day” and “Too Late / The Scream.” These two “braided” poems combine two poems each in a perfect marriage of form and function. In the former, one string of words illustrates how meticulous attention to detail and routine is used to assuage and even combat the fear, guilt, and uncertainty, the “unraveling” effects, caused by the depression, abandonment, and drug abuse presented in the contrapuntal other string of words. Similarly, in the latter poem, participation in art and writing is used to balance and resist the terror, the undoing, created by the unthinkable awareness of our children’s mortality and vulnerability.

It is certainly common enough that a book of poems contains one or two brilliant pieces. In The Next Moment, such brilliance is the rule rather than the exception, and it manifests not only in the form of the poems but also in frequently resonant phrasing. One line, for example, in “After a Drink or Two You’re Beautiful” memorably summarizes a child’s experience of living with an alcoholic mother: “Such heaviness, so many empties.” Another example of Kaufman’s facility for phrasing comes from “Last Words,” where the last stanza rivals the power of Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”:

I wish he’d die, now, quickly.
But first would lay
his rough hands
on the crown of my head.

The theme of a father’s loss treated in this poem is addressed with equal poignancy in “Comes a Time”:

In a black-and-white snapshot
proof that he once held me aloft:

my infant fist clutching his finger,
worry and wonder in his gaze,

the world opening--
our world of earth and air,

touch and smell,
grasp and release.

If it is true that we can judge a person by the company they keep, then certainly judging a poet by whose work they call to mind is a fair means of assessment. Frost, Adrienne Rich, Dylan Thomas . . . poetically speaking, Debra Kaufman is indeed a fine host for an outstanding selection of guests as her work takes its place at the table remarkable and memorable poets.

October Poetry Hickory Video

Here is a link to Jessie Carty's video excerpts from October's Poetry Hickory. The featured writers were Debra Kaufman and Helen Losse. Open Mic readers included Faze, Anthony Straight, DW Bentley, and me (reading from Pris Campbell's new book "Sea Trails" from Lummox Press). Pris is virtually homebound due to her health, so she doesn't have the opportunity to read her own work in public. Her poems can be quite "sexy" at times, which might make it a bit strange for me to read, but they're excellent poems and I relish the opportunity to share them no matter how it might seem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbvqb9zNPSY

Debra Kaufman: Poetic Virtuoso

Musings for September 24

Debra Kaufman: Poetic Virtuoso

There is only one poem from Debra Kaufman’s new collection of poems, Moon Mirror Whiskey Wind, that I would want to reprint here. Not because the book isn’t full of quality work--it is--but because this particular poem is so strong that it stands out among the best of Kaufman’s poems, just as it would among the best of anyone’s.
The poem is called “A Marriage,” a term which any poet will tell you comes pre-loaded with significance as it is a term often used to describe the way in which poetry works, marrying one thing to another through metaphor, analogy, and other forms of association. In this particular poem, not surprisingly, the term carries not only that figurative weight but the literal meaning of also being simply about a marriage.
There is much to admire in this poem, as there is in the collection as a whole, but my favorite aspect of “A Marriage” is the way in which each of the poem’s three “characters” (man, woman, and that same woman after self-actualization) are fleshed out phonetically. As you’ll see below, the man is characterized by 2-syllabled, short-voweled dentals; the woman, on the other hand, initially by long-voweled words that hum, and eventually by 3-syllabled words full of liquids that move from long to short and back to long again. The poem is a fantastic lesson in just how much meaning and emotion can be carried by the mere sounds of words.
It comes as no surprise to those who know her career that Kaufman is capable of such virtuosity in her poetry. After all, she is the author of four collections of poetry, the recipient of numerous awards for her writing, and a longtime active participant in such organizations as the North Carolina Poetry Society and North Carolina Writers’ Network. Originally from the Midwest, Kaufman has lived for the past twenty years in Mebane, NC. She will visit Hickory on October 13 to read in the Poetry Hickory reading series beginning at 6:30 P.M. at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory.
Here is the poem, “A Marriage,” in its entirety.

A Marriage

In his stories
he was always
the hero; she
the damsel in hers.
this is how families
are born. And endure.

The hard d’s of Dad
with its short a so brassy,
the soft yum of Mom,
her scent of cinnamon.

He said buckshot, slipknot,
topnotch, crackpot.
Steam, gleam, beam, redeem
the words she prayed.

Mow the lawn
floating swan
cut your nails
wedding veil
scrub that makeup off
buttercup

His crewcut, her creamy hands,
his steely eyes; her mind
drifting away to some airy
kind of heaven where
she glided beside Jesus
and above them sang thrushes,
where she was no one’s wife
or mother, where she was prized
(o rosary, poetry, reverie!)
for her pure soul self.

Poetry Hickory 2009-2010 Season