Today's poem
Illinois as Carrie Etter's hometown is broad and dry, as compared with the narrow land and humidity in Japan. The collection The Weather in Normal consists of lyrical verse based on geographic and meteorological characteristics. The book begins with the sonnet 'Night Ode' having each couplet in which the afterglow of her far memory remains. Especially, Chapter II grabs me with poems full of murmurs in the mind suddenly appearing or sometimes disappearing. The poem 'Afterlife' richly uses space that can interrupt metrics and rhyming, also can produce both coherence and incoherence of syntax. With her father's groggy slumber, her haunted memories are emerged, like lost and found. Deeply echoed in my mind. At the same time, although the landscape is completely different, by reading the book, I recall a Japanese painter Shunso Hishida (菱田春草)'s pictures with obscurity (朦朧体).
Eldest by Carrie Etter
(from the collection The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren/US: Station Hill))
Lean forward in shadow. The room is corridor opening into square, passage and purpose.
On the distant bed, a spill of mottled flesh, the white cotton gown fallen to little use. You gape in the doorway. His body is positioned away, toward the window. You stare until he calls, calls you into mutual shame.
Now you must gentle. The mind, relieved, packs away its unfinished question. The bowl of green gelatin has no scent. You hold it to your nose as he draws the cloth up with a tug, his grasp like a bird’s.
No, not shame. Not now. Though he doesn’t know it, he will be glad when you sit down at last. This is your father. The room is white and inescapable.
(from the website https://www.iambapoet.com/carrie-etter )
Illinois as Carrie Etter's hometown is broad and dry, as compared with the narrow land and humidity in Japan. The collection The Weather in Normal consists of lyrical verse based on geographic and meteorological characteristics. The book begins with the sonnet 'Night Ode' having each couplet in which the afterglow of her far memory remains. Especially, Chapter II grabs me with poems full of murmurs in the mind suddenly appearing or sometimes disappearing. The poem 'Afterlife' richly uses space that can interrupt metrics and rhyming, also can produce both coherence and incoherence of syntax. With her father's groggy slumber, her haunted memories are emerged, like lost and found. Deeply echoed in my mind. At the same time, although the landscape is completely different, by reading the book, I recall a Japanese painter Shunso Hishida (菱田春草)'s pictures with obscurity (朦朧体).
Eldest by Carrie Etter
(from the collection The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren/US: Station Hill))
Lean forward in shadow. The room is corridor opening into square, passage and purpose.
On the distant bed, a spill of mottled flesh, the white cotton gown fallen to little use. You gape in the doorway. His body is positioned away, toward the window. You stare until he calls, calls you into mutual shame.
Now you must gentle. The mind, relieved, packs away its unfinished question. The bowl of green gelatin has no scent. You hold it to your nose as he draws the cloth up with a tug, his grasp like a bird’s.
No, not shame. Not now. Though he doesn’t know it, he will be glad when you sit down at last. This is your father. The room is white and inescapable.
(from the website https://www.iambapoet.com/carrie-etter )
