Inside Lives: a review of For Today by Carolyn Hembree. LSU Press. Baton Rouge, LA. 2024. $19.95 paper.
For Today is about being a daughter and having a daughter. It is about what the daughter-mother knows and what she doesn’t know. It’s about dreams and reality, sounds and silence, the visible and the invisible, the past and the present, things and people, moving and being still, and sensuality and spirituality. For Today sets the standard in language that remembers, speculates, and celebrates being here.
Memories, of the remote and recent past, ease and unsettle. As the title of the book and the book’s final poem “For Today” indicate, memories are juxtaposed with the present. In “Some Measures” part 1:
now bauble by crib light
my baby, arm through scalloped sleeve, feels
for.”
From the hefty gourd to the ethereal bauble, the images are rife in texture. Tactile, yet paradoxical in that body reaches for a thing that will burst at a slight touch, as if reaching for something that isn’t there. The speaker addresses her late father:
funeral
my pregnant shadow pooled under me.”
The internal slant rhyme of noon and funeral’s accented first syllable sets up the assonance of noon and pooled. The shadow has a liquid, surreal effect. Sound and sight reinforce opposites, the father about to go into the ground and the child about to come out of the womb. A goodbye and a hello.
Throughout the seven parts of “Some Measures” the speaker addresses her father. In part 4, her memory of “that night they called you twice to the nursery glass” leads to “When will you let me go?” The last words in the book, “lets go,” pertain to the the speaker’s daughter who is learning to write, and at the end of a list of things “lets go” of her list.
Speculation, wonder, is significant throughout these poems. Again, in “Some Measures” part 1, the speaker wonders
taken,
what’s taken in.”
The speculation in “Dizzy Birds Fantasia,
views collapse, bend, and come back. Freight
train graffiti—
humanoid Princess-General packing heat”
resonates with the beginning of “Some Measures” part 6, “Now I am your gun” poem. In “Dizzy Birds Fantasia” she continues,
pepper
flesh dripping over that metal bikini.
The memorial mocks
and moves. I snap a blurry pic.”
Observation leads to speculation. The premise of “Dizzy Birds…” is that the mother has taken the daughter to buy a pair of new shoes. Towards the end the speaker (mother) says
shoes slide in this new
box we carry home.”
Like memory, speculation is juxtaposed with the present. And “box we carry home,” on a figurative level is reminiscent of the “noon funeral” of “Some Measures.” Also, later on in the book, speculation is sustained with a recurrent worm image followed by “secrets buried in the ground.”
The cover of For Today, a house on stilts with its black and gray, has the effect of looking through lighted windows. Someone has been there, and left the light on. For Today, of yesterday. For Today has a strong here and now aspect. There are a lot of things in it. Interestingly through the windows of the house on the cover, the dust jacket, all one sees is light. Yet the poems themselves contain many things: a friend’s earring, a straw hat, a father’s hat, ants, a worm, a carousel horse, finches, a cat—to name a few. Such a vibrant, sensual book, For Today is as much about what the speaker doesn’t know as about what she knows, an oxymoronic “ghost bike” and the synesthesia “Boat horns beyond the levee. Siri, what is today’s cargo?”
This book celebrates for the simple fact that poems are not made of memories and feelings but of words. In the final poem, “For Today” the speaker repeats poems are not memoirs, then, abruptly, who says they’re not memoirs? There’s a wry humor in her question. There’s the slang of “Woulda coulda shoulda,” and the immediacy of
back “Like
your hat”
I let joggers pass, one tightening her ponytail.’
There’s word play, repetition, and a range of diction that is at a par with the very best of contemporary poetry, a diction rife with sensuality:
flies and white moths
in high grass, waggling minnows in puddles,
elephant ears big as
flags, bottlebrush anthers standing-on-end.”
This catalogue is as rich in sound as it is in sight, and its sense, its meaning is simply an evocation of nature, of life. The speaker says, imagines these entities “cry in unison/ A moratorium on mowing!” The human world with its mowers disturbs not nature but rather the speaker. The poet knows poems are made up of lines, lines even in length and of alternating lengths as in the Spring, midweek passage, and throughout “For Today.” The speaker-daughter mourns the loss of her father, she nurtures her daughter, and observes the life around her. The poet celebrates in words she has full command of, in her lines.
For Today is about continuity, the father’s poems taken up by the daughter. In “Some Measures” she repeats “…I am your gun poem, I won’t be put down.” Along with repetitions and word play, puns such as “put down” are part of the collection’s textual tapestry. In the villanelle that begins part two, the speaker says, about writing, “I get it down.” In getting it down, she runs the full gamut of human emotions. For Today is both global and local, it’s about being alive, it’s about being part of a community. In “April 2020” the speaker says
pilgrims
arrive on winds, on foot, by bike, by car, by
bus
by streetcar. Nowhere to be, no intercessor, I
join them.”
She is of them, one of them, and does as well telling what that is like as she does telling who she is an individual. Much has been left unsaid, for one the book’s white space is as meaningful as its texts, its silences as meaning as its sounds, it invisible realities as meaningful as its arresting sights. This book eases and unsettles, it aims at truth and beauty and hits the mark. It rewards and in its revealing astonishes. Contemporary poetry is all the richer for it. For Today is as good as it gets.
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