Loon in Late November Water
By Freya Manfred. (Red Dragonfly Press, 100 pages, $16.)
In her ninth collection "Loon in Late November Water," Freya Manfred confronts aging while celebrating poetry as an accessible and practical tool for living. A woman searches for "a poem so sad that my body could collapse into it … a poem which would also hand me one flower." Poems "come like gentle friends every night."
Poems are spaces in which to work through struggle and strife in order to access the "joy and wonder" of the Minnesota landscape where Manfred makes her home. There she finds "water,/singing a fierce wordless song of being here, alive." The landscape is abundant with wisdom and inspiration; the loon in particular is a patient teacher. "I try to live like the loon, on the surface and below." This move between surface and depth is evident in poems that consist of careful observation that open into profound sentiment: "You've swallowed enough guilt — and lasting sorrow."
She longs for "plain words," and her work answers this longing with lucid descriptions and clear lessons such as "remember not to put duty and worry/before peace and light and love."
tsunami vs. the fukushima 50
By Lee Ann Roripaugh. (Milkweed Editions, 120 pages, $16.)
In "tsunami vs. the fukushima 50," Lee Ann Roripaugh personifies the 2011 Japanese tsunami as an avenging "annihilatrix." She — and Roripaugh's tsunami is decidedly a she — tears free of the "barbed wire that interns her," unleashing her fury in a torrent of ornate and wildly inventive language: "An escargatoire of sunflowers" and "a scourge of becquerels." Roripaugh's tsunami is a complex figure, destructive but not necessarily evil. A "cryptic giver of gifts," she possesses a "terrible radiance."
The collection's title recalls classic Japanese monster movies such as "Mothra vs. Godzilla" and honors the workers who risked their lives to stabilize the Fukushima nuclear power plant after the tsunami.
Monsters arise from the human-made disaster of the meltdown, something "as it turns out, preventable." In the aftermath, mutant animals survive with "cesium 137/disco-glittering their veins." Grief, trauma and desperation transform people into sci-figures such as the man searching for his lost daughter in the contaminated wreckage. His persistence earns him the nickname "The Hulk." Upon seeing a sign that reads "Nuclear Power: Bright Future/of Energy," he remarks, "I feel such a huge/surge of adrenaline and rage,/that I have to tear it down."