A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings by Eloise Klein Healy (Red Hen Press, 2013)

Eloise Klein Healy’s poems wrapped their fierce tendrils around my brain the moment I picked A Wild Surmise out of a bookstore shelf by chance. A compilation of poems from all of her previous six books, as well as new poems, this is about as in-depth as you can get into a poet’s work (read Timothy’s recent review and musings of another poet’s new and selected works here). But wait, there’s more! You can listen to Healy herself read a handful of these poems. Instead of being accompanied by a clunky CD, the book comes equipped with QR codes that bring you to recordings of Healy reading her own work. (You can also find these recordings here on her website.) With multiple entry points into Healy’s creative mind, I found myself utterly immerse and falling deeply in love with her poetic voice.

What stuck out more to me than the differences between her various collections is what was the same, and reoccurring. Obviously, there is growth and evolution to be seen in the progression of her works: her voice starts startlingly straight forward, and then falls into a more assuredly sage poetic voice, and later finds great freedom in vulnerability and reflection. But the similarities kept resurfacing, and tied this whole new and selected works collection together in a completely comprehensive way.

Greek influences are inherent in her entire body of work, with a whole book of poems dedicated to the Greek poet Sappho, whose lyric poems were about love and infatuation with both women and men, and from whom the word lesbian derived (more specifically, from her home island, Lesbos). A lesbian poet herself, Healy finds many points of connection with Sappho, bringing this ancient poet into today’s cultural environment. Artemis, Greek goddess of the hunt, also has a collection named for her by Healy, and the act of hunting and being hunted weaves a tremor throughout Healy’s work. Feminism comes at you like a wave, especially in the poems included from 1998’s powerful Women’s Studies Chronicles. And always, love. Love poems of all sorts, but be careful before you assume, as these are love poems that don’t fit into any cliched, trite category. These are sexy love poems, but not in a smooth, overly sophisticated way. No, these are physical and hearty, with a genuine outright love of cars, women, and cities. Find an listen to “Los Angeles” here, and savor the last stanza, like I do: “Nobody expected it / and you never told about / the lover who met you / loose and large / in the late afternoon / and loved you all night, / completely out of proportion.” The following excerpt from “My Love Wants to Park” (originally published in 1981’s A Packet Beating Like a Heart) demonstrates a more playful, loving side:

My love wants to park
in front of your house.

Thank God.
It’s been driving me crazy
going around and around the block.

It’s started breaking laws,
obsessively rolls through boulevard stops,
changes lanes without looking back.

It’s taken over the transmission,
drops into second when I try to drive by
and rolls down its own windows.
I had to pull the horn wires
after it learned to “a-uugah”
at the sight of your address.

Her love of Los Angeles is evident throughout each collection as well. One of my favorite poems about L.A. is  “I Live Where I Live” from 1991’s Artemis in Echo Park, which begins:

I live where I live because
it has nothing to do with me.
I could go on about the choices I’ve made
and all the other elements of my landscape,
emotionally carved or artfully decorated,
but the real truth is, here you can see
the ribs showing through.
The land’s way eventually surfaces.
it’s all softening like old chenille,
faint voices on patios in the summer nights.
So I say this has nothing to do with me
but it comes to my door
and I have let it in. […]

and later, that glorious ending:

[…] This has nothing to do with me,
this wildness that softens everything.
Then again, it has nothing to do but me.

She turns over these love poems with honest, seeing hands, holding their true heft and weight for us all to experience. Regardless of the subject, all of her poems drip with wisdom and assurance, and it’s obvious that her poetic voice is unabashedly confident in it’s own wildness.

While largely joyful or contemplative, she is equally skilled at pinpointing moments of tender loss, pain, and vulnerability. She takes us up close to the emotion, almost reaching discomfort at witnessing such rawness: cancer, a father dying, and rape. She also handles everyday sadness or the simple act of missing someone with the same clean arrow to the heart of the content, as seen in “Love Poem From Afar:”

This morning I’m more lonely than the sky,
That flattened tray of tin and rain

before the robin’s quick array of ruddy breasts
displayed the air a way that’s new

as when in their noisy gang
they flew against the blue

like stiches in a quilt
that’s being aired out with a shake.

I take some solace watching starlings
with their yellow bills root among the leaves.

They’re plump with some success, those clerks.

Healy is an active and accomplished poet, to say the least. She is founder of Arktoi Books (an imprint of Red Hen Press), is the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, and has widely taught college-level creative writing and women’s studies.

Whatever you can do to encounter Healy’s poems, please do. This is a book that I found myself wanting to read out loud to everyone I came across, to say, “Hey, please, listen to this one,” and never stop. There are too many favorites for me to ever excerpt in a review, and I think you’d enjoy it more to experience Healy’s life’s work yourself.

What other poets make you want to read everything out loud to the people in your life? Can you think of another poet who uses Greek mythology in interesting ways?