Introduction

Anne Silver's poetry is marked by an offbeat sweetness, its surface tasty as a beer pretzel. Like a ballerina on an adrealine jag, her poems leap from one startling insight and image to the night. Even though the sudden acceleration and torque often leave our imagination suffering space-time warp, by the end of the ride we find ourselves in a newly expanded universe. –Lee Rossi

On the pedals of her red bike, Silver stands and as though above the skyline, gleaning visions of the world. In her mid-fifties, she has served her novitiate, and comes across in her majority. She steps back, an onlooker at a theatre making herself part of a greater world, the audience and concludes, “I believe it is all improbable”. Among the surprises, the highest is the seeming miracle of her lover introducing “himself / onto the stage of my fourth act” Her later poems are syllabic, lyrical: one might call them a hymn //to him. Silver is on a pilgrimage which began with Bare Root: A Poet's Journey with Breast Cancer and which culminates in the recent love poems. Guided by her 21st Century circle of poets, as Vergil is escorted Dante, Silver derives much spiritual strength from her immersion in the richness and sorrow, the wisdom and laughter of being Jewish. “She gives us fresh reasons to love the humble and obscure, everything from mermaids and pickle relish to the compost shed every spring by the jacaranda,” write poet Lee Rossi. “She is a poet of celebration, and this despite desperate odds.”

How She has come by her revelation the hard way—is documented in her poems, her pilgrimage. She has gone through “Sheet-twisting nights" in Night Revisited, yet she finds Pardes (Hebrew for Paradise). Perhaps in her earlier book she was given the first petal in the rose of paradise. She promises herself, “I will look no farther than this.” Yet in The Ladder, a love poem like a contemporary Song of Songs, she is given the whole rose. Like the Egyptian-Jewish poet Edmond Jabes, whom she admires, she is at a threshold, writing “night and mornings of the syllables.” Redemption comes thru the word whose holiest letter is the aleph, so holy it must be silent. She sees herself akin to Antonio Machado's intent to name the unnamable until it is almost the thing itself.

In one sense, like the boy singing at the edge of the grave, she is keeping a vigil over her own life lassoeing the reader by her furious fascination with light. Her imagery makes leaps and she inscribes those she loves in The Book of Life. These poems are at times staccato as a burst of gunfire and at others akin to the niggun always being hummed under the breath of the Jew.

Part One
“Let Everything on This Table Spell Out What is Right”

Red bike ready to mount, the poet, at 54, is restless. “Calf muscles / balled and wedded to will,” she is filled with energy despite being within sight of possible goodbye, of “having what cannot be mended.” Miraculously, her beloved has found her “bald and shrunk” making her feel “kissed all over.” She sees all “staged / to make . . .slipping away a surprise party.” She follows in the invisible footprints of Jabes, who examines re-captured words. The language she recaptures in her night draws Silver up into a dazzling light. “The night and memory of my ancestors are in me now.” There are switchbacks, moments of doubt in this journey but essentially Silver writes to “Let everything on the table spell out what is right,” the title of this recent poem inspired by the work of poet Lynn Emmanuel.

This is a director's cut. Silver zeroes in and out: microcosm mirrors macrocosm Her voice can be jazzy, or can convey calm in he philosophic poems: I dub these Silver Psalms. In Deus Ex Machina, the poem in which she mounts the red bike, the world is depicted in terms of hoists which suggest the medieval world, and is set in a theatre, given an erotic spin:

I think it is all pulleys and clangs at the end. And then there is a sensation of the entire body being kissed.

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Silver takes stock, listing inventory in a material and spiritual warehouse of “ ‘nail polish bottle with its black helmet ” and “Lemon yellow place-mat” becoming boats that float us across a “wood grain sea.” People are here “spreading the morning Times like a border.” Although exquisite things such as “2 cup Wedgwood blue” come in and “Daffodils” hide “their petticoats” she would be happier “without / glass and dust smudging everything.” Her style is almost breathless. She addresses her beloved, “Won't you become that fig tree, / and we'll tangle our twigs together.” Lovers as tangled twigs “snaggle the moon as it tries to shine / into the lacy window I'm looking out of now.”

That window, in at least one profound sense, is the body. Hers is a body like the soldier's at the end of the sonnet, “Coda” rarely “completely out of danger.” She wears “a dead flyer in “ her lapel “a poppy bight as a siren / warning people to search for their children.” Berlin is always the target “seed pods to bloom into fire's light.” She stops to examine the meaning of her name, Anne: “Grace. Gratsia. Gracias. Persona con grata.” She is a person deeply grateful for the time to hold things of this earth.

In that spirit of gratitude, “Shenandoah” is sung, a, syllabic poem “Almost a plainchant, harmonizing, / we cross the wide Missouri.” Here is a stage, a “practice-hall” whose doors part to admit “Beauty” striding in “a young man.” This is the entrance of he lover which stirs her “riverbed / unmarred by loss or selfhood.” Her “shadow loosens from flesh / drifts to him, rushes her hands beneath his thin shirt”—these three lines remind me of The Song of Songs . Deus Ex Machina remarks that the very God who has descended, healing her thus far and bestowing love upon her is part of all being “improbable.” At the end of the poem, however, the world—Silver never clings to the world—is seemingly without effort let go “Beauty will leave him, / as it has left us all to sing of it / beautifully, and as one.” Taking the folksong for inspiration, the poet has created her own plainchant, her unique harmony crossing from life to the other side, shedding the shadow of the body. If she uses the word “beauty” fairly often going against Robert Frost's dictum that in poetry we try to create beauty without ever using the word, it is not a result of poetic slackness: it is because for this poet Beauty becomes almost a character as in the old Morality plays: Beauty is definitely an esthetic presence, a goodness which binds her to the fertility, variety, of earth when everything on that table spells out what is right. Anne's world is often a dangerous one, of stars that “quiver above barren fields.” When she listens to Renata Tebaldi in the ironically titled poem "Stage Four," Silver identifies with the heroine, Mimi, the Bohemian girl dying of tuberculosis, and is reminded that “I too am singing in another language.” trying to apprise people of her condition. Once in a while, the irony is perhaps a bit overdone and, for me, undercuts the strength: “For once in this try-everything life I'm allowed / to rest and enjoy Mimi coughing and freezing”—this is not up to the deeply personal and uniquely voiced anguish of the overall metaphor Tebaldi . . .singing in another language.”

A ‘Quiet Tree is another mellifluous lyric built upon opposing powers, music and silence. Anne listens as keenly as she looks at the world. The use of labyrinth as verb rather than noun gives a surrealistic torque to the poem:

Knowledge is plucked like a violin or harp string. The compression and concision of the Eden myth lead to the stillness of six hundred thousand Hebrews made speechless as God arcs a cloud east to west over Sinai.

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The Aleph is the holiest letter of all, the essence of the Almighty. It is the source. It is so holy, it had to be silent. Silver chooses her symbols carefully: flower, ladder, bike. We are given that enigma, an oarless canoe, and finally the transcendent Aleph: a place is created, an island to which sound, / for comfort, / returns.

No birth occurs without blood. Silver visualizes history and event using the color red to striking effect in Holocaust Hovering, where Alfonso has lost a leg “under a Warsaw train / as the engineer yanked a wild blast.” She envisions Alfonso's teen years as they sit side by side in Silver's car listening to “Gregorian chant.” Into the music, eerily “A saxophone announces itself / like a bull entering a ring, / and red leaves flurry across / the windshield” We see Holocaustal flame. We see carmine danger announce itself like a counterpoint running underneath life. Death is italicized .She slips out of that too and becomes “Like water.” In this recent syllabic poem, Anne Silver begins “with the drip of my copper fountain / unfluctuating, like the icicles / the must still appear each decaying winter.” She revives the window of her childhood bedroom and staring at “the melting dagger of ice / form the second story room in Detroit. “ Her car “carries the burden / of background blur” and links her back to her old Singer. Her juxtaposition of objects freighted with memory and her tone frequently conveys her diagonal humor, one which Billy Collins and Jackson Wheeler have marked as unique. Wheeler wrote, “Her work gets better and better. I think humor in poems is difficult to pull off, and she does it very well.” Perhaps that's one reason why one comes away from even the most anguished of these poems, refreshed by the agility of the poet's spirit. I think of wheels when I think of Anne's poetry: Kathryn-wheels, cartwheels, pinwheels, the spirit filled with rainbow colors in a masque, a dance defiant against darkness. In this sense, and in their theatricality, Silver's poems partake of the spirit of Pierrot, Harlequin. Bringing off the oblique laugh, she always retains her cool and lyric power.

Imagery cascades like a waterfall from mother's Singer sewing machine “Oceans of bolts of muslin unwound. waves / of sheeting rearing on cotton haunches” “fed to the presser-foot's' stomp”. She compares the sewing machine's sewing needle to the needle thru which she receives chemo. “The fabric folds into itself, unroiled. / The day I vanish through the needle / into the infusion of chemicals, / I will hold those cloth billows, stare past them" / until she will go with “That man” to the Bridge of Nowhere, a gothic place.” But she doesn't stay long in this Gothic place. She returns to things of this earth, her father's “face lost color / with the coming of darkness and our end.” She imagines that she is that man but it is not her desire to become so defensive, so braced for this world “where water, like the heart / truly selfish, goes where it needs to go.” She lets the chemo “drip stand for time. It can be nothing else.”

This is a mighty thing. It is at once stoic and yielding. She sees mountains hosting hikers for the day but the nurse tomorrow will seat another soul in the long chair and will “Check the drip, flick it with her finger.”

Death haunts Silver in her mother's death. She sits by the silent black baby grand hearing of her mother's death. In the light of artillery, she sings, (like the boy at the edge of the grave.) She imagines a passport, which is a form of transport:

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Passport is a linear syllabic poem which ends surreally with:

Theatre, geography, backdrop change: what remains is the revelatory sense of being alive among these improbable things. Two final poems catch the attention: "As ladder" and "Forever After." In the first, we see the poet inviting her beloved to “Come climb” her. To let his “robe / part” as he ascends. This is erotic, Biblical carrying distinct overtones of The Song of Songs. The lovers merge mystically like lovers in a sonnet by John Donne: becoming “Skin to / skin.” The lover is enjoined to “Rest” and “peer / through my panes, Jacob to the cool, / green breasts of hills / below.” The lover is Jacob: the beloved is the ladder of dream he climbs. The windows which are mortality become “panes” of the poet's body. In a surge of strength, the woman, the poet calls upon her Jacob to “Tighten” his grip, “I am / taller than that well / is deep.” Surely, this is the overcoming the well of the body's sorrow, its disease, with the spirit which wants “nothing but to bear” the lover's weight. Once Jacob has traveled up he may become gloriously spent and climb down to the “plain to sleep and / dawn.” This is a falling which is a rising.

The person addressed in “Forever After” is not the beloved. The person morphs, the rhythms and imagery echo “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” “In one life you blow-darted my trachea / as I was addling my canoe up the Amazon.” She has sunk a merchant ship in revenge for the time she was raped in Barcelona, violent acts; she was “lashed to a Banyon tree in Carthage / for roasting and eating. . .arms in Burma.” This poem gives blow for blow: harming a donkey for whining “from oasis to oasis.” Bashing a skull for drawing graffiti over bison on the cave. This is bitter unlike the world of pulleys in the red bike poem where the poet stands tall on her bike pedals. Deus ex Machina. No miracle comes to rescue the two wrestlers from their own punishments, which suit their crimes.

After this poem, she takes her bike. “Even if it's cold, it's still / lighter than that cycle of dark, turning, turning and returning . . .standing high on the pedals—bike ticking left-right-left. . .even though there are things / more frightening than getting lost.” She squints straight into sunlight “as the day rises, we rise / as the day closes, we go.” As in “Discovery” where Silver learns about the Holocaust at so tender an age that her whole world was “the size of mother's oven,” she must have her own fate.

Part Two
Spelling Out What is Wrong:
Ark for One

The place, the locus from which these new sonnets and experimental poems spring is an ark for one. The poem must have a hard place of fact from which to grow. In Ark for One, cancer recurs: the poet spells out what is most deeply wrong, still opening the book of wonders, the inventory of the spiritual world: plants, planets and astronomy to give meaning to her reading. The sense of something not right began on the poet's return from Barcelona. She chooses to follow “The rivers cutting / through the plains of my palm” In Omens, she looks back at what she would have done had she been given a crystal ball. “Too busy snapping photos / of the moon snoozing in the Joshua tree, ” she had no sense of the dark question mark beginning to hover over her.

The poems of Ark for One explore this “Night Revisited,” take his journey, with energy, courage and sheer joy in narration.

Silver envisions a “stencil of lace,” young animals, baby opossum “chews / lemon rind in the tree” and hummingbird “swivels / her scarlet neck.” She who will in the later poems tire needs now to “bind things with thread.” This is a time when world still holds together although on the verge of unraveling. She asks why in the darkest hours of night “burrs lodges” in her lungs.

Now begins the dark dialogue (with God) which weaves its way thru the volume culminating in the surreal quiet Canoe where she loses touch, with the earth, the breeze "with the willow's perfume."”

In between “Barcelona” and “Hear, Oh Living Creatures” lies the journey. If it is not the year in hell, it a year which flirts with both heaven and hell. Coke bottles become bowling pins. Fork paused above machaca and eggs, the poet listens to sounds as if for the first time.
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Bleak as the journey promises to be, Silver redeems it from despair by her particular sense of the humorous. She often accomplishes this by visual acuity, or by a sense of dislocation as in Alice in Wonderfland. Being sucked down the long tunnel, she pictures herself at a bowling alley “not being able to stop sliding.” “Pleasure and panic are twins” like Diane Arbus' photos of twins/ Silver has a filmic eye. Witness to her own suffering, she etches a self-portrait eating “at Pepy's Grill / abutting the lanes,” and “peeling a Power Bar” Sprayed bowling shoes, Coke machine will hum eternally, but her light feels as if it is being extinguished. It is “absurd to think” she might “step off / the edge of the world.” Sheer moxie wins. Yanking the garlic, a lust for red and green draw her back. Earth-ecstasy overtakes her, a thing she has in common with Mary Oliver.

In Bare Root, a “rag doll” is “draped on the table” discovering that the surgeons “sew with a tender needle. No hurt.” By a quantum leap, Silver moves to her own doctor benignly saying "“malignant." ”an offense "“as slender /as burnt toast." ”The embroidery over the doll's heart remains love you." A lovely poem that pales beside “Prayer” or “Basic Astronomy," which have more resonance. In Prayer, sitting up for lunch the poet sees “a cloud shift form” morphing from “a winging peace gull into a yeoman / oaring the Volga of the sky.” From minute to immense the movement of metaphor swings. The yeoman is up against struggle, the peace gull is winging. In dream, Silver stands “on the bedpost of the tor” visualizing all her friends. “None of my dead were there, so I went back.” This is drop-dead beautiful. She has gone to heaven, and died. But she decides to come back. This statement vaguely reminiscent of Sexton and Plath has more hope. Anne Silver slips back into her “sun dress” going out to water the garden as though this bleak dream had never occurred. “Basic Astronomy” employs more stark, even grim imagery of pathology and the sky—yet light years away there is rebirth:

The light flicked behind an x-ray illumines the body's planetary pathology in white film.

In other poems, lungs become “suitcases / jammed with souvenirs, Girona headstones. . .cigarette smoke.” Chameleon-like, her ancestors have slipped into her rib cage and “sit in the waiting room” of her chest, “Gnawing and sucking the terrible tomatoes / of their palms.” Spiritual, physical ancestors have determined the fate she suffers as she recites the Kaddish. She begs refuge entering customs. Ark for One closes in resolution. “Of living, / the iris speaks to me / eye level, / blooming on the table” revealing itself to be more purple by the hour. The poet speaks to the flower telling it that it is severed, in a vase, not rooted. ” She will outlive the iris because she will “forever bloom inside this poem.”

There is a moment in ‘Good Night” (after Larry Levis) where total peace overtakes the poet.

Like Edmond Jabes, Silver, so much of this earth, is at last a religious poet. A wanderer, poised upon a threshold voicing her angst and her elation thru re-created languages, vowels and syllables. "I must look upon my poemsas dreams and later interpret them," she wrot me. She is able “to catch the baton twirling.” She sings her niggun, and now sings the new-born erotic and spiritual passion hymn to him. “Burls in the hollows” of her skeleton become logs. The body rolls itself into sleep. Even the heart missing the mother “wrung itself” for the night and “the cherry orchard” of her lungs “expanded their canopies.” This director's cut; this microcosmos reflects the world in poems occasionally fevered, more often, wise, attentive, reconciled and reflecting what Martin Buber called “unfevered mysticism.”

Both hands on the handlebars she rises high, “Back on Path,” “through with / the chemo ward's slick floors,” lungs filling with air, she stands on the pedals of the bicycle. She has harnessed health by relearning life:

Coda:

What's in a name? Anne: grace, persona con grata. ” Compressed, the love will be a cloud” and all of us will slip perhaps as from this life from the robe. Envisioning, empowered, she will remove her mother's ring. Maybe she will enter a world like her “Crash Dream,” where she can transfer “the shards / from” palm to board, “Work & fit / every last piece / back into its original place.” Alive in the “night and morning of the syllables,” although “Crazed and cracked,” the poet will raise the sugar bowl, her favorite one, “as the sky rains / sugar.”

Anne Silver realizes that “The “Great One has been directing” her life from day one. It will be interesting to see where this nimble, exultant poet heads. In her latest poems she experiments with the pantoun, the Petrarchan sonnet.

In this recent cluster of love poems, there is something new and surprising: call it fruition, culmination: another wheel is inferred, the wheel of life which has no beginning and no end. Here is the order and radiance of paradise, Hebrew Pardes emerging from a sombre backdrop. Anne Silver, standing on the pedals of her bike thru her poems and floats thru the universe. We all envision our own final day. On her last day “in this dinghy of bones” she wants to be “glad not sad:"