I have a terrible time picking my favorite anything. What’s your favorite movie? Favorite band/singer? I have no clue. I could never pick a favorite genre of fiction or favorite type of poetry, never mind a favorite author or poet. So, Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh was a gift from the universe that fell right in my lap. This collection contains poems that range from Sapphic stanzas to a cento sourced from Virginia Woolf to abstract poems and free verse to a poem written after William Wordsworth. No need to pick a favorite.
While there are so many different poetry formats in Pigeons, they all share a unique voice and use of language. It’s not flowery like the wallpaper in an old stuffy manor, but it is flowery like a hillside in the sun, covered with wildflowers, attracting bees and hummingbirds. Walsh’s language is as iridescent as the pigeons in the title.
From ‘Not Fell but Fall’:
Childhood summers
I would stand waist-deep
within the gentled sea
as if it were my vast and rippling skirt
and sunlight my chemise.
Below my feet
a ballroom floor of glossy stones.
From ‘Visiting My Son, Foreign Student’:
I could carry you the last time we were here.
My hips still know your weight notched in my waist,
your fingers at my neck light as love, your
nodding head’s dense rest. Snail tracks
of your saliva on my chest.
Walsh’s brilliant language imparts a natural beauty to the everyday events in these poems and heightens them to something extraordinary, a subject worthy of poetry. And what is more poem-worthy than love? Familial love, romantic love, the love of and for a loyal pet, and even the loss of a loved one.
From ‘Innocence and Mercy’:
I had done so many things to make my mother cry
but this was accidental.
Mercy came in the form of my grandmother’s bemusement,
her calm amid my mother’s mascara-flowing storm.
From “I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds.”:
I want to touch you
in the mottled dawnlight
mist of larkspur shadow
pressed thin
Another engaging aspect of Walsh’s poetry for me is her genius wordplay. It feels like another expression of love. This time it’s a love and appreciation of language itself.
From ‘If the Wound Is How the Light Enters You, How Do You Heal?’:
Remember how mar means flaw and also the sea
How ding means dent and also a peal
How rupture is the godmother of rapture
How pain is also bread.
From ‘Things I Broke’:
First marriage, on purpose.
Wine glasses, canaries of a certain coal mine.
The sugar bowl my mother made in arts & crafts to get a break
from me.
Walsh ends the book with ‘Love Poem for Laura #4, 2009”. This tender love poem seems a perfect closing to a collection that explores and portrays so many aspects and versions of love in so many various forms of poetry. As the blurb from Margaret Ray, author of Good Grief, the Ground says, “Come for the influence of Virginia Woolf, stay for the ‘Dogs and Their Lesbians’!” She is not wrong. I’m so happy to have come, and so glad I stayed.
Comments