By Anita Foxall.
Modern Poetry and Frank: Sonnets were my first encounters with Diane Seuss’s poetry, both Fitzcarraldo Editions published in February this year which I picked up from Southampton’s own October Books. This Michigan born poet grabbed my attention as soon as I started reading the first poems in Modern Poetry, and it’s unsurprising that her Frank: Sonnets won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Modern Poetry takes the reader on a journey of imagery. The rather raw approach to the various themes that the poems convey is done in a way that is so beautifully relatable. The lyricism and vulnerability that live in these poems form a rich composition of powerful images in a range of themes such as poverty, addiction, and the working-class experience.
Diane Seuss clearly relishes in breaking the rules and subverting structures, as the poem Villanelle so clearly shows. It’s an astonishing poem about loss, identity, and the human life. However, just because it defies the villanelle structure, doesn’t mean it lacks in rhythm or composition.
A few poems really stayed with me after reading this book:
Bobby – a beautiful poem with a very delicate looking structure and rhythm. It is a poem about the past which starts with death: ‘All the actors from the sitcoms / I watched as a child are dead’. Then it navigates in a sea of nostalgia memories of songs once sung and ends with a strong hopeful message of resilience: ‘I barely began to begun /and I’m not done’.
In Against Poetry, the reader is directly addressed, taught that poems are not living creatures, and therefore ‘A love poem does not love you’, but she then delves into other forms of art and compares them to poetry. The end would take us to the ultimate form of art: the body? I question it for the poet states that ‘Mine is the kind / of body you drag around / town on a leash, with a choke / chain. / You don’t love it, / but it’s yours to contend with…’, but ‘Maybe the body is the soul’s / metaphor’.
Untitled starts, in my opinion, with the strongest opening verses: ‘I can’t title any more. / It’s like naming a baby “baby”’. This is one of the struggles of the artist – what should I name this poem, song, piece of art? Sometimes it’s born with the piece in question, sometimes it never comes. The poem that explores the people’s names, such as Jesus (how many random ones are there all over the world?) and how contradictory they sometimes are to people’s appearance.
Frank: Sonnets is a slightly different collection, as the title itself promises that readers will indeed be presented with sonnets.
Flipping through the pages of the book, one quickly notices a unique feature: every poem is meticulously aligned to the top left corner of each page. The next thing that is clear, before you even start reading, is that the sonnets don’t follow the traditional sonnet structure; her mastery of poetry enables her to break the rules and take the structure to a different level, her own structure, her own world.
This world that you are invited into focuses on similar themes to Modern Poetry: loss, mortality, resilience, and some of her personal life and experiences.
The first sonnet in this collection, I drive all the way to Cape Disappointment shows the tired vulnerable human dealing with the fragility of the body.
The force that breaks the body, inevitable is another sonnet that explores the theme of pain and fragility and how inevitable it is to face these, and that it’s possibly more beneficial to embrace them as part of life, enabling growth.
The collection continues with this ever-present link, with an ever-present sadness, which even leaks into her writing: ‘I’ve encountered the exoskeleton of a book I wrote or poem / or word I passionately laid upon the page, the passion’s gone.’
Luckily for us readers, these poems reached us and will hopefully continue to find many more pages and books.
These two collections are indispensable additions for poetry enthusiasts.
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Available from good bookshops, including October Books in Portswood, Southampton.
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