Foregoing the Flame

by Terry Lucas

Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague, Joan Baranow, Brick Road Poetry Press, Phenix City, AL, 2023, 84 pages, $16.95, www.brickroadpoetrypress.com.

THE TITLE POEM OF Baranow's 2023 Brick Road Poetry Prize-winner ends with these lines:

At that moment tears fell

on ink not yet dry,

leaving a faint stain

but keeping the words intact,

traces of whatever had happened

outside the room

of this bound book.

In these memetic poems, if not written in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, at least assembled during its time, there are more than traces of what happened outside their pages. This collection pays homage to the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska while presenting the struggle we all experienced in carrying on daily life in spite of the pandemic. For instance, in Szymborska's poem, "Reality Demands," the poet lists examples of everyday tasks that must continue in the midst of war.

There's a gas station

on a little square in Jericho,

and wet paint

on park benches in Bila Hora.

Letters fly back and forth

between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,

a moving van passes

beneath the eye of the lion at Chaeronea…

Baranow similarly recognizes that quotidian life goes on even in the midst of social upheaval. In "Shelter in Place, Sixth Week" she observes the tensions that inevitably arose during California's shelter-in-place mandate:

But humans still make plenty of racket.

Road crews are at it,

chewing up asphalt, laying drains.

The neighbor, who's usually so quiet,

shouts at her son,

"Don't touch that again!"

Just this morning, ambulance sirens, twice.

Kids skid down the street

on outgrown scooters

just to get out of the house.

Out on the porch,

behind the fence,

as far as the curb,

we wonder aloud what's for lunch.

And then there's my son

who, still "in school,"

logs on for aural drills.

Until 8 pm,

when the whole town howls,

you'd never guess anything was amiss.

While at moments cynical, Baranow's poems more often accept our shared struggles and counter crises with humanity and self-deprecating humor. In "Business as Usual on Zoom," she wryly asks whether "grief and disbelief / sound tinny through our mics" during a Zoom faculty meeting in which "the VP claims / the college can't sustain / its hundred-year-old music program," but at the same time she assures us that "we're still the same, / maybe more so," with attendees showing off their pets and toddlers making an appearance on the screen. Baranow's humor emerges again in "Getting Up There," which pictures an older poet trying to climb a tree, and in "Lunar Territory," which makes fun of her own aging body:

…Being old

feels the same as being young, only they

see you've passed into lunar territory,

desiccated, carbon-dated, tagged and laid

on cotton felt, a place they sense

but can't imagine, since

gravity's on their side, the trees more lush,

there's dancing on the patio where music,

drinks, and polyamorous kids compare

their beautiful new tattoos, where

sweet dappled apples small as walnuts

festoon the view.

Baranow's musicality in this poem and others underscores an overarching optimism that never loses sight of inevitable loss and death. Her poem "Ars Poetica" is a musical tour de force, intended to illustrate the poet's self-scolding not to get too complacent with sonorous beauty at the expense of rugged reality. Her overt allusion to John Keats's "Bright Star" evokes both his romantic yearnings and his eventual demise from tuberculosis.

Ars Poetica

A freight train, fretful,

passing through the ditch,

complains of a stomach ache.

Its wail infantile, spasmodic,

reminds the poet to put

great spurts of static in her verse.

When lulled by a valvéd voice,

drugged by love, or opium,

rough it up—the sum

depends on syncopation, boist-

erous—steroidal—caesura-ic—

split signatures of tune

not unlike stomping a foot

to wake the student up.

How easy, else, to expire

there—pillowed on a breathing breast,

steadfast, starlit

mewing—like kittens soothed to sleep—

As with so many poems in this collection, the music is masterful, beginning with "freight train / fretful // complains, stomach ache" and moving in the next stanza to "spasmodic / poet, put / spurts of static." After a third stanza of "valvéd voice / love, opium / sum," in the fourth stanza, the diction is pushed to include hyphenated words ("boist-erous—steroidal—caesura-ic"), enacting the "split signatures" and the "stomping [feet]" that "wake the student up." These "great spurts of static" that a poet is reminded to put into her verse are not unlike life's challenges that can either wake us up or cause us to "expire // there— …/…/…like kittens soothed to sleep—"

Much of Baranow's optimism is rooted in her observations of nature, which continually presents life emerging from death. When her neighbor's hundred-year-old oak tree topples, she sees that her own had been starved for sunlight and can now experience a rebirth.

Spring, Despite

After our neighbor's coastal oaks collapsed,

our own felt the sun again.

Their long limbs, splotched with lichen

grew new stems.

Even the 100-year-old oak by the kitchen door,

its spine bent and twisted,

sent, somehow,

a sprout from its arthritic back.

Looking at it from within my own soft casing,

I imagine the pressure

as it burst its bark,

feel the bough suck sap from its veins.

Quarantined by the nation's state,

I can't help but check each day

on this late life birth,

this thorny bouquet.

Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague stands as witness to the resilience of the human spirit and dreams of a good world in the end. In the final poem, "Prayer," the Taoist in the poet comes to the front, accepting the way things are as a form of grace the universe provides: