Reviews

 

 

Psyche's Weathers by Cynthia Atkins

Custom Words, 2007; 116 pages; $17.00
ISBN 9781933456874, paper
http://www.custom-words.com

Reviewed by Philip Miller

In a poem from her book, Psyche's Weathers, Cynthia Atkins writes:

And when you speak, we'll watch the clouds
shift with our breath, because the weather always
      has something to say:
frost and chimney spilling one fraught bonfire
of duplicitous desire.

                ("October's Other")

Indeed, Atkins generously shows us in poem after poem one intimate connection after another between ourselves and two kinds of weather; one from nature, the other within us. These weathers closely follow the people of Atkins' world, shifting as their "breaths shift," providing locations for human dramas and contexts for our evolving mythologies. Atkins does all this while also trying to catalogue just what weather "has to say"—which is almost everything!—about our "duplicitous desires." Weather, Atkins also tells us, "interrupts our own discourse" and "gives us something to say." ("At the Mercy of …") Her book's title, Psyche's Weathers, not only alludes to the myth of the two lovers, Psyche and Eros (the union, of course, of soul and body), but it also suggests the mind's weather, and from the first poem to the last, both kinds of weathers, become formally and symbolically inseparable:

Somewhere at the furthermost tip
of this city, there is music alternating
in the falsetto jowls of wind. Teeth marks
into infinity, …
There is nothing more explicit than this:
a threshold of trees disrobed, a narrative
of light in a window, a paradisal of ice
like hung chandeliers.

                ("Sacred Season")

Atkins (who holds an MFA from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Roanoke College in Virginia) has arranged her poems into a kind of Shepherd's Calendar, the poems' ironic tone reminiscent of the glosses in Spenser's classic work. There are poems for every month and the collection is divided into seasonal parts, winter to fall. This design still allows Atkins an amazing variety of subject as these titles suggest: "The Cows Are Lying Down," "Persephone at the Library," "February News" (which includes a montage of TV shows), "Freud's Weather Channel," (using language and phrasing from "The Weather Channel"), "Vermeer, A Meditation," "(Like) a Rainy Night in Georgia," "Weird Sisters," "December's Widows." These poems are highly compressed dramas, often only of the mind: small anatomies, poems which give the impression they explore every facet of a subject as in "God's Watermark":

God is big. God is round.
The Force to be reckoned with—
The face of our latent prayers.
God is small as the mouse
standing in our shadows.

In these lines from "Voyeur, or Blue Guitar," the outward level of its narrative (its outside weather), actually explores an inward psychology—a weather of dark and shady places:

In a neighborhood of disdain
between eyelashes of rain,
beware the tweed overcoat
of winter. Ignore the deviant shadow
slouched around the child-drawn faces
of houses, …

The form, anatomy, I must add, comes from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, which contains his literary "field" theory about archetypal patterns of plots and symbols and their connection to the changing of the seasons (literally tying literature to the weather) and to which this collection consciously or unconsciously pays homage.

The initial poem in each section introduces the season and anticipates the tone and imagery of the entire set of poems. The first poem in the book, "January Calendars" (like Atkins' entire collection), goes through all the months like leaves of real calendars depicting work of painters like Hopper and Kandinsky. The opening poem of the autumn section reveals well Atkins' mixture of high intelligence, emotional restraint, and evocative language she uses in her very quotable lines and stanzas:

Summer has closed its factory
of hours. The work-a-day sun has gone
to an earlier dark, as the moon
                takes the night shift. Then, we have to say
'so long' to our imaginary friends (little phenomenons)
spun from webs of pretend);….

                ("September's Labors")

A little later in the poem, we also discover: "Autumn is setting up its office of leaves."

Of course, Atkins' subjects often derive from the months and seasons, the cycles of nature, and so I was not surprised to find each poem with its unique slant, choosing fresh images, new metaphors, and using an original, contemporary style, all things, in other words, that readers of poetry usually want and exactly what Atkins provides, as in the beginning of "Naming the Wind (March)":

          … The manic winds are
     anxious and alert,
          a winter of inmates rattling their chains.

Moonlit and lonely, I want you to touch me
where it hurts.

The book's title poem includes these subtly startling couplets:

… she climbed the hill to witness
the quintessential thrill of what isn't anecdotal—

to catch a glimpse (if only momentary) at the embrace
of night lying with morning, then gone …

I highly recommend Cynthia Atkins' Psyche's Weathers (with its splendid Picassoesque cover featuring a work by Scott Kattenbraker). Atkins is a highly inventive poet with a restlessly observing mind, her poems of meticulous notice, almost Jamesian in their concentrated insights. They are filled with wit—puns, asides, odd rhymes, high and low dictions, word play. Each poem has an essential place in the collection, which gives the book its completeness—just like the successful connection between ourselves and our fickle, beautiful, violent, comforting weather that this poet achieves in poem after poem. In "Blizzard Internment," Atkins' asks

                …Were we put here

for this phenomenon of weather, determined
      to loosen love's epitaphs from tombs of ice,
            before a looming sun comes to melt them?

And then, as if answering her own question (and in the last lines of the book's last poem), she tells us we are made of weather: " … the story that never gets told./We are made of water, matter, wind, and bone. ("The Rickety Bricks of History").

 

Philip Miller has poems scheduled to appear in Barrow Street and The New Mexico Review. A new book, The Ghost of Every Day, is forthcoming from Spartan Press. He lives in Mount Union, PA and is a contributing editor of Big City Lit and edits The Same.