For poets, the muse manifests him/her-self in a wide variety of ways; but poets can’t always wait for the muse to drop a topic in their laps. In the “Notes” section of Change: Poems, a chapbook by Shann Palmer, she says the poems in the collection rose out of a challenge to write a poem-a-day during the month of November 2008. When a poet shows up for work every day, inspired or not, and just writes whatever comes to mind, patterns in thinking appear. What is the poet obsessed with this month?
The eleven poems in Change wend their way along a short timeline in the life of their female subject, each touching on some transitional point in the subject’s life. While some of the poems are written in first person and others from the point of view of an omniscient “other”, the reader gets a sense that the omniscient narrator is really the subject standing back and looking at herself. For instance, in “Adaptation,” the narrator throws light on the dark cause of the woman’s obsession with tidiness:
Don’t suggest she see a doctor,
she doesn’t wash her hands raw
or alphabetize the soup cans, she has
discovered order is its own reward,
his suits hug the closet, with those
magazines, those dirty magazines.
At other times, the woman, speaking in first person, conscripts the reader into complicity in her psychological defense-building, as in “Burrow”:
When there is nowhere left to be lost
misunderstandings are softly covered
under a thick blanket, where we can
overlook hurts, conveniently blind.
Change: Poems was the winner of the 2009 Writer’s Digest Poetic Asides Chapbook Challenge. In a small space, Palmer has managed to tautly explore the subject of change from a variety of angles, and leaves her readers wanting to know what happens next.
12 pp.
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