cover image Catlives: Sarah Kirsch's Katzenleben

Catlives: Sarah Kirsch's Katzenleben

Sarah Kirsch. Texas Tech University Press, $24.95 (177pp) ISBN 978-0-89672-232-3

Poet Levine, in his foreword to this first collection, rightfully applauds Jones's masterful rhythmic impulse and unerring use of language as he examines human perseverence in the face of what Delmore Schwartz called the ``dark accidents'' of life and nature--whether it be the death of a loved one, the ``cruelly disfigured'' face of a steel mill worker, or a natural disaster. The particularly moving poem ``Going On'' speaks of a tornado ``in the morning light, / they marvel at the random / or miraculous--the cinder block / skewered by a broom straw, / the china closet spared / in a roofless house-- / and salvage what they can.'' In elegies, poems about childhood and meditations on nature, the poet's details and imagery vibrate with stark emotional intensity, as in the evocation of moonlight that ``drips from the white wrist of a branch'' or a recollection of dolls as ``one-eyed smiling amputees,'' the battered relics of childhood. One series of spare poems features Grabow, an everyman mystified by his growing children, nagged by his wife, and struggling in difficult times; ``Take it easy, fella'' he says to a panting dog he passes on the road. (Dec.)