When Katha Pollitt’s wonderful book of poems, Antarctic Traveller (the “adventurous” title belies Pollitt’s skill, displayed in several of the poems, at seeing the poetic material inherent in her home turf of New York City), was published in 1982, it seemed to launch a promising poetic career. But Pollitt went on to concentrate on nonfiction with such books as Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, and Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism.
At last, this year, Pollitt offers her second poetry collection, The Mind-Body Problem. It was worth the wait, simply because many of its poems don’t feel like they were manufactured to manufacture a career. Rather, they feel like they were generated out of a real need to speak about life issues that concern us all eventually: aging, nostalgia, regret, disconnection, and what constitutes a healthy acceptance of life.
From Sidney Poitier to Psyche
Though the book’s middle section, containing contemporary riffs on biblical themes, such as Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise, the character of Lot’s wife, and the suffering of Job, don’t add enough to the familiar discussion to make them more than mildly successful, the first and third sections not only dazzle, but also work beautifully together to pose conundrums and offer delicate solutions.
Perhaps “dazzle” is the wrong word. Pollitt’s basic method, established in Antarctic Traveller, is to envelop the reader in a delectable conversational tone, and then inch beyond simplicity, all the time providing surprising details (everything from a scene from a Sidney Poitier movie to a rummage sale to a woman sniffing cantaloupes at a Key Food grocery store to mythical figures like Psyche to a 1965 Modern Chemistry textbook) that both ground and challenge the reader.
In fact, her world is such a recognizable world that the poems generate a crystal clarity that sometimes stifles thought. But it’s all so skillfully conceived and presented that aesthetic delights ring out even when the content can’t leave simplicity far enough behind.
Pleasure In Metaphysics
The essential issue of the first section is our metaphysical relationship to a past that’s no longer there in front of our eyes. The way Pollitt plays with and teases out the layers makes each poem in the section, such as the sobering “Rereading Jane Austen’s Novels” and the lovely “Night Subway,” seem like a new discovery about what the medium of poetry can do.
The last section, with titles such as “Dreaming About the Dead,” and “Small Comfort,” is not as gloomy as it seems, but a fascinating exploration of our metaphysical relationship to real, non-reductive consolation, and how that works as we wend our way through a certain present into an uncertain future. Pollitt’s one of the few poets in America who can make solid, pleasurable, and resonant poems out of such complex ideas.
Title: The Mind-Body Problem
Author: Katha Pollitt
Publisher: Random House, June 2009, 82 pages, $23.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6333-8
