February is my least favorite month to venture outside, much less to attend a reading. Between dressing in layers of shirts, socks and shoveling my car out of a 6” snow bank piled in front of my driveway, I’d rather just enjoy sitting inside my warm, cozy house with a cup of hot cocoa. But, since I heard that poet Candace Black was going to read at Hamline University, I decided to brave the frigid night air.
The small auditorium was filled with students and poetry lovers like me anxious to hear Candace read from the recently published book of poems The Volunteer by New Rivers Press. Her poetry ranges from the simple pleasures of witnessing nature and visiting the amusement park to larger experiences that every human faces. The tone of her poems is honest, conversational, and in some stanzas quite intimate.
In her poem entitled “Laundry”, Candace compares a pile of clothes to men and suggests how one can reel one in. The poem sounds like a voodoo recipe:
Clothes have no new secrets, no clues
to the man inside. Try them on.
Feel his thigh around yours,
fold the sleeves to your breast,
say his hands cover me. Celebrate
the bleach that kills his salt,
leave your own in the crotch and collar.
It will bring him back
like a ticket.
After reading that poem, laundry will never be the same dull chore again. Many of her poems are candid and reflective of experiences a mother shares with her child. Indeed the relationship between a mother and her child is the common thread that links her poems together.
In the persona piece “Wedding Portrait: The Mother of the Bride”, the narrator’s tone takes on a bleak view of marriage by showing the sacrifices a young woman must make when she gets married. “Let the poor girl admire her gloved hands./After tonight she’ll never touch satin again./ Only goat dung, only blood: a chicken’s, a child’s, her own.”
Anyone reading these poems can relate to at least one of them. A 40-year old mother can sympathize with a mother watching her son running in “Track Meets” when she says, “We want to let go./ We’ve been practicing too./ And yet we know how deep they can reach, how much beyond all they can give./ That rush of kick still feels like ours.”
Or there is a poem you come across that transports you back to those carefree days you spent as a child when all that mattered was having fun or skipping school with friends to spend the day at the amusement park. As the dark, long days of winter wind down to let the warm spring breezes roll in, I find myself enjoying the lines in “That Old RollerCoaster”:
“When you buy your ticket
at the invisible booth, and yes,
we all buy tickets here, you don’t feel
his windfingers fleecing you of everything
sane. You close your ears
to the silent chorus that screams
Turn Back.
Only your past
keeps you in your seat.
Yes, this is it, love,
or the ride there.”
- Rhonda Niola