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Lessons in Space
by Cathleen Calbert
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"Once
again, a bad year for the skies.
Ice on the wings. Terrorist activities.
The shuttle shooting stars, a white blossoming,
newscasters suddenly speaking of the face of God
in the face of such large and instant beauty,
saying, surely that medley of men and women
has vaporized into angels. But on the beach,
a burned helmet, bone sliver from a slender foot.
Back in Houston, people explain things.
Just miscalculation, not God calling them up
with powerful love. But an error.
Technical. Human. Sufficient."
—from the poem "Lessons in Space"
Cathleen Calbert’s poems are like sudden
blooms in provisional, temporary spaces—a suburban
childhood, an unhappy family, the thwarted freedom of
adolescence, dead-end jobs, cafés, buses, trains, and rented
rooms in foreign countries with restless boyfriends—all
places where another life (her real life) is dimly felt to be
just around the corner. These, however, are only the poems’
settings. For her subject, Calbert takes the vivid, saving, small
details—the taste of things, the feel of things, their
color.
Through the details Calbert lifts, floating above the places she
would rather not be, beyond the grasp of people she would rather
not be with. A crack in a blue cup, the egg’s "white
holding white, holding a yellow ball," a "dream of
blackberry," "the sweet dirt of the peach and apricot
trees"—these are Calbert’s "Lessons in
Space," transformed, through the details, from lessons in
waiting to lessons of hope.
Cathleen Calbert’s poems have appeared in The Best
American Poetry, 1995, Paris Review, Harvard Review,
Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, New Republic, Ohio Review, Hudson
Review, and other literary journals. In 1991 she was named a
Discovery Prize winner by The Nation, and in 1994 she
received the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society
of America. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
1997. 88 pp. 5 ˝ X 8 ˝.
ISBN 0-8130-1502-2
Cloth, $24.95
ISBN 0-8130-1503-0
Paper, $12.95
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"For all the toughness, asperity,
gall in her exacting inspection of those circumstances we find so
hard to make out—adolescence, marriage, love, la
condition féminine—there is an abiding sweetness in
Cathleen Calbert’s poems, honey at the heart or at some
other center. Her poems are like pomes, indeed,
delectable within the rind, but guarded, sly."—Richard
Howard
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