Slender Lilting Volume of Beauty

Diane

…swift, bright, drift… by Diane Jarpvenpa (2016. Red Dragonfly Press. ISBN 9781937693831)

There is is,

hanging from the top

of a living room painting

like a dogwood pod

or an old dried-up fig.

So begins Twin Cities singer/songwriter and whimsical poem, “Holding On”, a piece about a misplaced, solitary bat that enthralled me. My favorite line in swift, bright, drift is included in this poem:

A changling in its perfect frailty…

Stunningly simple and yet, so descriptive. So unlike my prose, where words beget words beget descriptions that sometimes beget redundancy and confusion. Here. there is sparse clarity, the poet setting forth scenes and emotions without extraneous verbiage. This is not to say that these simple poems channel verses written during childhood; little bundles of word play wrapped in neatly rhyming couplets. Rather, as demonstrated above, Ms. Jarvenpa (known as Ms. Jarvi when performing music) asks us to suspend our disbelief and walk with her through cosmopolitan backyards and along the banks of wilderness streams as she narrates.

Broken into three short sections, a half-dozen poems or so in each section, I read swift, bright, drift twice, not because the poetry is difficult but because I knew I’d likely missed something, some hint of the poet’s intuitive love for place, family, and nature. My only criticism is that this volume feels truncated. But then again, due to its size, this slender book is one a reader can revisit at his or her leisure, carefully examining the cut of each wordsmithed gem along the way.

4 and 1/2 stars out of 5.

Peace.

Mark

 

About Mark

I'm a reformed lawyer and author.
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