Sycamore: Poems

Sycamore is an unusual kind of love song. Each poem is an opening and a closing to the listener where there are keys and locks and play, and what is disclosed is often not fully disclosed.The speakers are frequently coy as the poems gesture towards the past but also to the present, from the mystical and magical, to the everyday, and even the ordinary, like the platanacea family tree that precedes the poems and moves from Geb all the way down to "Gray Dish of Butter."The poems are steadfast, sky-reaching, roots driving down, beautiful and light and fierce and strong, and all have (often surprising) bite.There is intimacy and lust and love and death and destruction and rebirth in "Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more."Ultimately, there is rebirth.A beautiful collection.

Kathy Fagan's Sycamores is a collection of poetry that is about lost and fading, but enlivened by bits of the surreal or by Fagan's sly humor. Like Berryman, who Fagan invokes in her epitaph, there is a negative capacity of ambiguous emotions often represented by Sycamores in winter. Contemplative but doesn't veer into being ponderous or a dirge, Fagan's collection should be savored.

Subtle, intelligent, heartbreaking, mastful.

I've been reading Kathy Fagan's poems for a long time, and I'm glad there's a new one this year. Check out her other books Lip and The Charm. Phillip Levine said that these poems are like "slowly burning stones," so it's tough to describe them any better than that. Fagan always has fun with words and phrases (and, therefore, the reader does too!) and draws from history, art, and science, so the collection is really rich reading. In "Sycamores at High Noon," she writes: "I am your outline, your line out, / your line-up, your lesson, / Kilimanjaros infinitum, / choirs of white-washed / roller coasters past." It feels good to read that aloud and ponder. Milkweed Editions is publishing fantastic poetry--check out their list. I just ordered another!