Homage

Homage is a generous cornucopia, evoking poets, artists, and teachers—their legacy in Kathleen Spivack’s life as an immigrant daughter, an American writer, a loyal friend, a lifelong teacher. It is a thank you. Beginning with a brilliant sestina about playing ping pong with poet Elizabeth Bishop in her last years in Cambridge, MA, and ending with lessons from cellist Pablo Casals, the book speaks intimately of its subjects, walking the reader into a painting, introducing us to a French teacher in Tours, a hitchhiking hippie visiting Robert Frost’s farm in New Hampshire, Rilke in Paris, Gauguin in Tahiti. Madame Joelle Blot, my French Teacher offers a metaphor for this collection. Madame Blot insists on bestowing branches from her lilac tree, climbing a ladder, then descending: “you mouse-stepped down the ladder, little feet in little strappy/high-heeled shoes, set the lilacs firmly in a crate and carried them inside…” She crushes the stems with a hammer, presumably to make them fill with water, and sends her pupil home with lilac boughs. “They glowed in my damp/chamber, lasted for weeks, as you said they would,/and flung their weighted perfume recklessly about.” Like the lilacs, these poems stay with the reader, casting a mysterious, lasting pleasure. They’ve been honed and crafted with Madame’s antique hammer. They celebrate life. In the delicate, intense To have and to hold the poet describes to a former partner and to the audience “The glare and white whoosh of that Yes.” — Elena Harap, Street Feet