Lyric compression and a wonderful command of the plain style make Andrea Cohen one of a handful of poets who can make her voice the conscious echo of her mind. And it's a mind well furnished with whimsy, heartbreak, and moral questioning, a mind brilliantly attuned to the tragicomic, Kafkaesque nature of the day to day. But unlike Kafka, these poems don't end in conundrum, paradox, and irresolution - they also partake of the comprehensive affections of a writer like Chekhov, as unsparing as they are forgiving, resolute that their ironies not stop at irony but give a full account of our need for love, sex, personal identity, and spiritual understanding.

for spring, whose cancellation or postponement has not yet
been announced, for the bounty of the innocent treasured here

and now, praise and praise and praise.

The poems in her book are a bounty in this way and it is a bounty of the innocent and the innocent is treasured here and now, and praised, in poem after poem. The things of this world are in these poems -- children, birds, fish, an ant caught in a sugar bowl, two lovers listening for and not hearing the cry or howl of a grey fox whose suffering they'd witnessed earlier, she herself seen in a shape-shifting fun house mirror, a wedding dress of peacock feathers, lit by a mangled paper lantern. It's the unblameable beauty and variety, of creatures, children, trees, artifacts, bounty that's always seen and heard in the condition of what you might call their joyful vulnerability.

The book is bountiful too in the variety and skill of its versification. There are many different and pleasurable kinds of music in these poems.

Andrea Cohen's poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, Glimmertrain, The Iowa Review, Memorious and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, The Cartographer's Vacation, received the Owl Creek Poetry Prize; other honors include a PEN Discovery Award and Glimmertrain's Short Fiction Award. She directs the Blacksmith House Reading Series in Massachusetts.

Author Photograph: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

Fairy Tale

 


Copyright © Andrea Cohen 2009

Andrea Cohen's poetry blends thoughts on science with witty observations on life, writes Kate Kellaway. Andrea Cohen was, for me, something of an unknown quantity. The press release accompanying this collection explained that, for her day job, she writes about marine research at MIT. A quick glance at one poem - a farewell to her dying brother - explained that he used to be a stand-up comic, and described the rapport between them. What to expect from her? Would her poetry be oceanic? Full of jokes? Or fish? Her first collection won a sprinkling of obscure awards in the US. Best to put the second on hold? The odd thing was that this was easier to decide than do: these poems stubbornly refused to be dropped, kept swimming back into my hands. And with each reading there was fresh pleasure and growing recognition, and the making, on paper, of a subtle, witty, sympathetic new friend....

Cohen writes conversational poetry. Her lightness of touch and her lack of self-importance are a tonic. She never travels heavy. Her poems are dominated by the idea of transformation (the outside world is always promising us release from ourselves). At the same time, she acknowledges that this is a doomed project: we cannot give our self the slip. In the delightful "To An Ant Fallen in the Salt Shaker", an ant is on a misguided course, hoping to encounter sugar. Cohen likens this to hoping to embrace sweetness herself:

I too have mistaken it/ for sugar: the bright blizzards are similarly blinding, inviting,/ and once you have an ache for nectar,/ turning back is hard.

Her counselling of the ant is absurd and serious. The blend of gravity and wit comes naturally to Cohen.

A similar fancy is at play in "In a Haystack" (right). This witty poem is set out in a thin vertical shape, so we encounter the idea of the needle before we start to read. She promotes the needle into a character escaping the straight and narrow and swapping steely destiny for the promise of hay - the pull of the wide world. (There is only one word that jars - "skin", which even the most enterprising needle lacks.) But the last lines once again demonstrate her winning sympathy.

In "Explanation of Autumn", her neighbour's son considers transformation in a different sense, cross-questioning her about trees. The poem is casual and chatty, with an amused gleam. And its last verse, with naturalness and grace, takes the conversation beyond its beginnings:

Crossing the street,/ he takes my hand and bends/ my brittle finger back, hungering/ for blood or sap, thirsting/ to understand how close/ to kindling I am,/ how close to ash.

The vainest of all the attempted transformations - playing at God - appears in three separate poems. In "The Beauty of Youth", her little son has a shot at it:


In "The Incomplete Knowledge of Man", she speculates about three workmen:


Of all these, entertainingly conjured, she concludes:


And in "Terrible in Math", it is her turn. Instead of grappling with numbers, she remembers standing on a desk, in her yellow pinafore, "pretending/ to be God". Her maths teacher ticks her off, telling her "hereafter not to/ pretend, but be". It is advice that may not have improved her long division, but it certainly defines her poetry.

Andrea Cohen is an award-winning poet and short story writer whose work has been published in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, Glimmertrain, The Iowa Review, Memorious, and elsewhere. An accomplished professional and an experienced academic, Andrea Cohen directs the Blacksmith House Reading Series and writes on the subject of marine research at MIT. Long Division is her latest collection of free verse and is an ideal and recommended introduction for those new to her poetic style, and a welcome update for those previously familiar with her work in her Owl Creek Poetry Prize winning anthology "The Cartographer's Vacation" (Owl Creek Press).

Detective X: Temptation to Believe

Dumbstruck in the awesome
forest, spring leaping up through loam,

fiddleheads unfurling like giddy seahorses
under the green awnings of scotch pines

that don't close shop, one wants
to applaud, to throw or to be

roses, to address a thank-you moat
to those responsible, to imagine

such splendor is never random,
and then, dizzy beneath the cornflower sky,

I apprehend how lost I am.