Amidst the tumultuous day, four children scatter-shotting around the house, I often lack a sense of a mooring point, no firm ground to stand amidst the dishes and dirty feet and whirlwinds of feelings. But I am delighted, perhaps more so than the average person, by the sumptuous delicacy of silence. And beyond that, time itself or at least the way my time is used, has become something I’m obsessed with.
Thus, I was delighted to slip into a warm bath and devote an hour to reading the new book, Her Whole Bright Life, by the poet Courtney LeBlanc. Some writers love to savor poems, but I’ve always loved slipping into a book and reading it through in one sitting, letting the wave of another consciousness wash over you.
I have always been attracted to visceral writing, that which cuts through or illuminates life as it is lived. Perhaps raising children has made me less patient with ornamentation for its own sake. So, I was delighted to sink into LeBlanc’s world, poems about the death of her father and her relationship to her body, poems that are raw and unvarnished in their honesty about grief, about loss, about the management of the body, all those things we cannot ever really control but still try desperately to.
After the bath was over, I kept thinking of an image from her poem, “What This Elegy Wants,” when the speaker wants her father “in the soil/of my heart.” LeBlanc’s poetry has that element I’m always searching for, a reminder, not so much about the beauty of this world but its ongoingness, and the fierceness with which we temporarily cling.
