The Bird Catcher
Keen, Suzanne
Words take f l i g h t Suzanne Keen ~ ead over time, a journal like Commonweal begins to feel like a friend, known well enough to be praised and abused, missed when it goes away over the summer...
...Oceans hiding desirable continents flank it...
...Yet there is never anything pat about the thinking or phrasing even in the most rigorously formal of the verses...
...The family picture, wrecked, soaked in cold, would slip wet & dangling out of its frame...
...Cats want out...
...There may be other rules I have not discerned...
...What could the "underbutter" be...
...Its flank turned to the flank of the hill, the dog turns off the vista and sniffs at fresh grass...
...Close to the kennings of Anglo-Saxon verse, Ponsot's evocative word pairs comprise a bright thread running through the poem's fabric: "entrance-ways," "sun-flush," "woodlot," "wheel-house," "land-mass," "new-born," and "root-threads" evoke an archetypal pattern of arrival, dissolution, cycling back...
...The root-threads pop out a strong bud, lower down...
...Angels fly into the fresh vat of cream & suddenly it's butter...
...Framed, it's a wind-break...
...Underbutter" is mysterious: "Sudden awe sudden dread" pulses a rare inward interruption in the searching outward gaze, in the terse descriptions...
...Wheel-house: the house rides a cooling land-mass...
...Sudden awe sudden dread: the visible fontanelle just under the scalp of the delicate new-born head...
...In a series of books over the last ten years, Callahan has poked at the foundation of Western medicine like a moral engineer, documenting its fragility as he examined attitudes toward death, our inability to set funding priorities, and our addiction to the notion of endless medical progress...
...Demands exceed resources in every case, Commonweal 2 4 September 25, 1998...
...Water flushes its hidden places...
...Question: Is then the underbutter the soul or the life force inside...
...Far better, the poem suggests, to stick with a tight container, a form that acts as a windbreak and preserves home and family, averting "the worst cold...
...It's never too late./Sweet is your real estate...
...The causes of these disorientingly different actions remain obscure, except for the angels who make the butter come...
...Meanwhile, almost 15 percent--over 40 million people---of the U.S...
...Some poems are so direct that a collection of their last lines can reasonably evoke the power of their themes...
...The round earth turns as it rides...
...BETTER SOLUTIONS NEEDED Christopher F. Koller n just the time since this reI view was commissioned, Viagra has assaulted the nation, and the media have heralded a new generation of cancer drugs--smart bombs which only target cancer cells, based on genetic research...
...Having looked serious health-care reform in the eye four years ago and blinked, the United States is now receiving exactly what it asked for: healthsystem changes driven by the private sector...
...This gives the poem the feel of riddling, as in the first stanza: "This house has three entrance-ways./Water flushes its hidden places...
...Words take f l i g h t Suzanne Keen ~ ead over time, a journal like Commonweal begins to feel like a friend, known well enough to be praised and abused, missed when it goes away over the summer vacation, relied upon to recommend its favorite books...
...Marie Ponsot's The Bird Catcher begs to be pressed into the hands of a friend...
...With anti-Romantic sentiment, this poem casually props no wind harp (Aeolian lyre) to await inspiration and let in the destructive wet...
...If we force it open the glass may break...
...Suzanne Keen teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia...
...I know I will not be alone among Commonweal readers to recognize Marie Ponsot's name and poems from these pages, and I hope I will be forgiven for quoting at length, in case anyone out there has missed her...
...False Hopes is Daniel Callahan's canary-in-a-coal mine message about the plight of Western health-care systems...
...Dusk dawns...
...From "The Border": "Getting married is like that./Getting married is not like that...
...This sampler of conclusions suggests how accessible, how aphoristic, and even quotable Ponsot's poems can be...
...Though the poem's speaker tacitly urges adjustments in consciousness, it scarcely reveals the mind of the human person inside the container of the house...
...Let me begin by commenting on the end...
...Like Elizabeth Bishop, another poet who conjured up the elemental from the homeliest of subjects, Marie Ponsot uses demanding forms without making the reader feel the strain of artfulness...
...Answer: the body...
...Bats scour the near air as it cools...
...Living room" The window's old & paint-stuck in its frame...
...Often lost in the debate are the facts that managed care has reduced health-care cost increases and can improve health indicators, that wide and unexplained variations in clinical practice do exist, and that no alternatives to private financing and delivery of health care are being considered in the United States...
...The possibility--and in some cases the reality----of managed-care companies inserting themselves clumsily into treatment decisions between patients and providers has created ground for outrage...
...From "Pourriture Noble," a moral: "Age is not/all dry rot...
...population have no insurance of any kind, and convenience stores brim with home-made posters announcing fundraisers for various victims of various maladies...
...I don't know, but I want some...
...Ponsot risks losing some readers when she returns again and again to elaborate Provenqal verse forms, sestinas and villanelles, and she ups the ante when she adds (arcanely) two "tritinas," one of which I quote below...
...Callahan begins with a fundamental observation: all systems of health-care delivery and financing are under duress...
...Marie Ponsot's poems both invite and disarm this kind of readerly questioning...
...It suggests not only the burgeoning that can be induced by pruning, but the adjusted point of view that enables us to see the "strong bud, lower down...
...And from "Festival of Bread": "The widow shoves her night-time self aside,/ Commonweal 2 3 September 25, 1998 kneads silence down into dough, and lets it rise...
...This final pair of lines tells a story of loss and recovery, set in the vital miniature world of the window box...
...It averts the worst cold...
...The poem has already carried its reader through a dizzying variety of perspectives--in the house, hearing the water somewhere--looking out at various times of day--suddenly spinning and dwarfed by the scale of landmass, oceans, and planet--shuffled down from earth flank, hill flank, dog flank, to the dog's nose--whisked from the ether with the angels into the interior of the churn...
...perhaps some of it lies through the fontanelle "just under the scalp/of the delicate new-born head...
...Perhaps also the intimation that a lapse in the performance, like the imagined crack in the pane, would "buckle every saving frame," adds to the urgency of the wordsmith's work...
...This tale, embedded in the nouns, does not contradict the top layer of implicit story: a person (woman...
...The resolute plainness of the language helps to justify the densely packed repetitions...
...The delicate tip of the window geranium broke off...
...A tritina goes the troubadours one better, evidently requiring the recycling, in decasyllabic lines, of three end words in one-two-three, three-one-two, two-three-one order, with a concluding line that employs each end word in one-two-three order...
...These changes--in all their ragged, inequitable, and profit-driven trappings--have left many citizens uneasy...
...Take a gulp of this poem, "Underbutter" This house has three entrance-ways...
...Along the way the earth gets older, cream turns to butter, and the sight or memory of an infant's skull swerves into the sublime emotions of awe and dread...
...Marie Ponsot writes wonderful ends of poems...
...Broken windows cut, and let in the cold to sharpen house-warm air with outside cold that aches to buckle every saving frame & let the wind drive ice in through the break till chair cupboard walls stormhit all goods break...
...False Hopes builds on his past work and extends his reach across all national systems of health-care delivery and financing to consider what attitudinal changes are necessary for modern medicine to survive...
...Sun-flush slides rosily off the wall...
...Politicians have seized upon managed care as a political horse to whip in the coming elections, and the pharmaceutical industry continues to prepare a boutique of designer drugs to accommodate the inexorable aging of a selfobsessed generation of baby-boomers...
...in a house considers its structure, notes both times of day and woodland neighbors, carries out ordinary tasks without dulling to their mysteries, considers two kinds of delicacy, human and vegetable...
...Anecdotes of needed care denied or delayed as a result of managed-care companies have driven public perception and public policy...
...From "One is One," a command addressed to a wayward heart: "Join the rest of u s , / a n d joy may come, and make its test of us...
...Depending on one's definition, over 80 percent of the population (or double the number five years earlier) now receive their care through some form of "managed-care system'--where choice of doctors and access to services are limited in exchange for reduced rates and a supposedly predictable budget...
...What makes a poem in so tight and elaborate a form transcend the sense of exercise...
...Deer nose out of the woodlot...
Vol. 125 • September 1998 • No. 16
