Marvel (the Word) by Ellen Lytle, and: Day True by Roberta Gould (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Marvel (the Word) by Ellen Lytle, and: Day True by Roberta Gould
• Hilary Sideris (bio)

marvel (the word)
Ellen Lytle
Nirala
https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9788195191567/marvel-the-word.aspx
112 pages; Print, $29.95 day true
Roberta Gould
Independently published
96 pages

The past interacts a great deal with the present in Ellen Lytle's poetry collection marvel (the word). A New York City poet now living in the Hudson Valley, Lytle writes in fractured lines that eschew transitions. In lowercase and often in the present tense, she narrates quotidian activities such as cleaning and making a salad. These activities might also include a visit to the cardiologist, [End Page 97] where she observes her heart on a screen. Even as her mitral valve leaks "octopus bluish ink, backwards into her chamber," Lytle considers "mayonnaise or // hummus / chop or cut onion, celery / or spinach," paying attention to serious medical issues and dinner alike. Her flat affect provides a counterpoint to the tragedies that unfold—Trump's election, the death of a dear dog—and allows her to sidestep sentimentality and record the lived moment.

Lytle's matter-of-factness permeates such poems as "hurry them all to sea," which begins "usually after he muff dives my crotch / i laugh at everything," and "everyone needs something new in september," in which the poet packs up clothes, which is "almost like packing away people," and turns on a lamp, "guessing her return / will already be dark." Noticing a ripening squash on the kitchen shelf, she reflects that she "could have loved him / could have roasted that squash for him." Regret, that most useless of human emotions, crosses her mind, but not for long.

Sometimes Lytle opens the door to the past, and even invites it in. Struck by the cleanliness of her new apartment in the poem "death may be a visiting dove outside our window," she mourns goode, her deceased Welsh Corgi, remembering his "first relaxed sleep soiling" and his subsequent messes, "his few spots scrubbed up / as if they never were, all his toys, except punchy / donated." His memory lives on without his stroller, blanket, and "plump bed," despite his owner's attempt to render him "erased from the life scape" because, as Lytle acknowledges, "November's in charge."

The past also haunts the poem "caught between trees in a marsden hartley painting," which begins with delight in the moment when "celery stalks fit perfectly / into the cold water pitcher, sitting / joyously on the fridge shelf" and then recalls "stumbling with goode / through thickets of trees / as if caught inside a painting where it's impossible to foil cold," before delving into the distant past by way of a 1954 photo of her mother in a sunhat:

skies fall like rotten roofingand I remember those peoniessent to cheer her one christmas

flashy pink blossoms, big as balloons, [End Page 98] real flowers from a florist arrivingexpensively wrapped, and me playingin the dirt, though all I could see and smell

was … we must be rich

The poet's mother receives a bouquet of "expensively wrapped" peonies, "real flowers from a florist" in someone's attempt to "cheer her." The flowers overwhelm the child in the dirt with their brightness and fragrance. Rather than delve into her mother's sadness, though it is important to the poem, Lytle renders the child's experience of the moment when the peonies arrived, large, flashy, and balloon-like, and her world looked and felt rich.

Roberta Gould, another Hudson Valley poet from New York City, approaches grief and loss directly in her new collection Day True. Like Lytle, Gould writes poems that can read like diary entries, necessary notes during a swiftly passing day, as in "Faster Than I":

An ant is luggingthe fragments of a twiga hundred timeslarger than itselfacross the dikefaster than Ipeddling my bikeagainst the wind

Although Gould often writes about the natural world, she is also skilled at capturing precise, idiosyncratic New York City moments, such as flipping through a discarded literary magazine on the subway or bumping into an old friend at a bus stop...