Review: Cathedral/Grove by Susan Glickman
A poetry review by Michael Greenstein
A cat perches on a bare branch, arched as if to pounce – a menacing image on the cover of Susan Glickman’s latest collection of poetry, Cathedral/Grove. Against a black background the cat appears almost white and moonlit, while the bare branches contour the feral creature. Its feline limbs grasp parallel branches, while its trunk rests as if it were a nurse log. Cathedral derives from seat, and the cat sits; grove derives from branch in this interconnected realm of flora and fauna. “Cathedral/Grove” relates to Notre Dame in Paris and to MacMillan Provincial Park on Vancouver Island, as Glickman’s poems span geography and history.
The epigraph to this book, from Izumi Shikibu’s The Ink Dark Moon, echoes the cover’s moonlit sonatina: “the moonlight also leaks / between the roof planks / of this ruined house.” Amidst planetary ruins, and between the sublime and picturesque, Glickman’s words restore domestic and natural order, for her baby grand piano lurks in the background sounds and is itself a miniature cathedral/grove responding to Bach and “tuned to the same vibration / like instruments to concert A.”
Her opening poem, “The Daytime Moon,” reverses one version of the book’s cover where the moon is virtually absent. The poem uses repetition to shape vision in the same way that cat and branch are shaped and contained. The observer is caught in lines about a lunar haze: “at once modest and tenacious, reflecting the sun’s rays while reflecting / upon itself, its tenuous grasp / on our attention.” Glickman’s telescope creates reflective and astonished moods where tenacious and tenuous grasp each other the way container and its contents interact. The second stanza expands astonishment and holding pattern through a folding repetition: “the way someone who loves you holds you / in their thoughts, …/ and holding / for the moment your thoughts / return to them.”
From daily routine, the poet turns to seasons in the next stanza: “Autumn spends its gold so lavishly you would think / winter has been cancelled, but no, / soon we will huddle inside, / feeling more unloved / than ever.” In this ode to autumn the moon remains constant by the end of the poem – “while the moon shines on and on.” Unseen, the moon shines on the book’s cover to illuminate the contents of Shikibu’s “ruined house.” In its daily trajectory and monthly metamorphosis, the moon calendars imagination and emotion, shape-shifting the contours of Glickman’s stanzaic progression.
Her second poem, “Like Instruments,” reverses its own order to reflect upon itself. “Like” underscores similitude and a correspondent breeze between nature and observer. The Romantic opening recalls Wordsworth and Coleridge: “When I was a child / whatever I saw stirred me.” This initial enjambment pauses in caesuras of specificity: “pine cone, seashell, duck, caterpillar.” These, in turn, open up to “the sable-tipped russet hairs of a fox” – a line whose sibilance and fricatives stir the air around the fox: “its golden eyes / full of wilderness.” And the repetition of “wilderness” further opens the sense of wonderment, as its eyes spread gold. After the first sentence a universal similitude resonates: “Everything was tuned to the same vibration / like instruments to concert A.” The quest for perfect pitch is interrupted by a momentary dissonance “of red innards by the roadside, / a squirrel’s corpse.” Russet turns to red in death’s note that intervenes between songs of innocence and experience. The squirrel’s death becomes even more personal: “grandparents dying one by one, / younger than I am now / though they seemed so old.” The poem then steps back line by line to cover a lifetime, the wilderness in domestic reversal to encompass similar resonance.
“Maple” again relies on “like” as a poetic instrument and proceeds from the zenith of sky and mood before heading downward “like my people, transplanted from eastern Europe, / like my people, considered by some / invasive.” The second stanza tracks the history and longevity of the Norway maple, “a good biblical span.” Migration and transplantation reach their conclusion in the final stanza, which shifts the earlier “like”: “Like it or not, / everything is a metaphor for everything else.” Like everything tuned to the same vibration, the all-encompassing metaphor startles in its singularity and totality: “fish, virus, star, landmine, tree.” Explosive landmine and virus disrupt the order of the universe with its sublime and picturesque polarities.
“Unusually Warm for November” repeats the “as though” construction to grasp experience. The casual title is undercut by the sudden dramatic opening, “Death walked into the road,” where death is personified and realized by a woman who enacts “the random violence of life.” The driver of the car slams on the brakes, while the pedestrian stamps her foot “as though to shoo a cat away.” The menacing cat on the book’s cover appears in a different guise by the roadside. The second stanza repeats “I slammed on the brakes,” while the pedestrian walks “as though nothing at all had happened, / as though I weren’t even there.” These parallelisms focus on the road and traumatic relationship between driver and walker; and the final “like” identifies the fates of both women: “like me, part of a phantom procession / to the nearest cemetery.” From death walk to phantom procession the poem enacts a danse macabre between various vehicles.
That cat walk takes place in the “Walking the Dog” section of the book where ordinary acts confront extraordinary circumstances. “After Finishing the Cryptic Crossword, I Took the Dog for a Walk” balances cryptic and quotidian, crossword and crosswalk, meditative lyric and narrative. The black-and-white crossword reappears in the dog’s black nose in the snow. “So we ventured into the world / and discovered a mystery.” Each stanza serves as a step in this worldly walk, and the next stanza explores “bare patches,” spots of time that stretch out in significance: “each one flared from the base of a barren tree / as though it were a memory of that tree’s / full-foliaged summer shadow.” Like the daytime moon, the displaced season lingers in the line of cryptic discovery. The next stanza carries on her epiphanic walk: “And then, as we rounded the corner, / a single red apple stood, shining, in the road.” Just as her feet walk, so her mind wanders through her landscape of memory and associations: “bringing to mind the brilliant cardinal / nestled inside a bush on the previous day’s walk.” This apple cardinal is a hinge that reiterates the cat’s nestle on the cover and the two birds above it, which are barely present in the cathedral’s contour. At stanza’s end Glickman’s wit and flight of fancy surprise: “who therefore had to fly into this poem.”
Mood swings from this light note into a more menacing presence in the second half of the poem. Muddy scars on the white field appear “as though the hand of God had transported / whatever it was skyward.” The next stanza reveals a potentially menacing figure: “until the bulky silhouette of a man appeared.” That shadow figure turns out to be an innocent boy within the noir scenario. The poem is resolved in reflection: “Shadows that were not shadows. / An apple impersonating a bird. / The boy inside the man.” Sentences summarize the incident and its recollection that offers a tentative tranquility. The boy inside the man is another nesting potential. “Mysteries upon mysteries.” As the poet walks, a cryptic cat waits, while birds branch mystery and grove metaphor.
The outer walk is also internal in “The Virus Enters the Body”: “The virus enters the body / the way a man enters / a forest: / stealthily.” This abrupt beginning reintroduces the threatening silhouette from the earlier poem, as Glickman again forests her cathedral. The stealthy virus invades the body, and man keeps moving because “it gives shape to his days,” as the shape-shifting poet carves her sylvan vision through quarantine and pandemic.
“Walking the Dog” attracts lunar shapes once again: “The moon shrugs white shoulders and mist diamonds the hedge.” In “The Gloaming” she encounters a fox “sauntering into his own / long shadow” in the “moonlit snow.” Cathedral/grove makes its way into “July Afternoon” with its bird sounding and shaping: “From his perch in the shadowy cedar, / an enthusiastic robin makes up in volume / what he lacks in melody.” Another bird in a shadowed grove, another shape “on a bent stalk of dill,” where “my mind meets my mind.” These garden and forested encounters are reflections in tranquility and mystery. If Notre Dame Cathedral suggests the sublime, then Glickman’s forest walks enact a domestic picturesque that puzzles the grandiose grove.
The dynamic between picturesque and sublime plays out again in “Nurse Log” with metamorphosis of self and world. “Everything is becoming more itself / or something else.” A sense of wonderment connects the individual to multifarious nature, and growth to decay. “A single cedar splits / into seven trunks, one of which is dead.” Sibilants accumulate to multiply splitting changes in forest, sky, moss, flowers, and “long fingers stroking the shivering ferns.” Personification of the log animates the cathedral grove experience:
The nurse log sighs and settles deeper into sleep.
Nuzzling into her side a maple sapling
imagines amplitude;
Bird on branch gives voice to the forest’s flux:
Above them, invisibly,
the wood thrush pours out her liquid song
of praise, which is the same as her song
of sorrow, which is the same as saying
this is where all things live
and all things die.
Through Romantic notes and modern similitude the poem celebrates a rebirth in its final line.
Glickman’s cathedral also contains a number of Jewish poems that exhibit her witty sensibility. “Her Past” begins with painterly scenes of crimson koi, water lilies, and reflected clouds, but these Impressionistic details are soon denied as belonging elsewhere. Instead, she sees “her aunt’s goose farm, white feathers / aloft in the air like snow.” Past and present fuse in a simile:
“or like spume behind the boat / bearing her to America: to the father who had found safety / in another life, another language.” The poem balances European shtetl life with the new world where Yiddish accents flicker reflections of past and present, Vishtinitz and New York. The poem ends with a couple of questions that expand from personal experience to universal truths: “To grasp at a chorus of ghosts receding / or to be trapped in a present of meaningless pain? / And what do people mean / after they speak of ‘a good death’?” A chorus in a cathedral, ghosts in a grove – these are part of the meaning in unanswered questions.
The “Chimera” section of the book contains most of Glickman’s Jewish poems. In “Eyerlech” (Yiddish for eggs) she shapes her poem in a nesting pattern where miniatures of meaning are contained within larger cathedral chimera. “The dream of the house with hidden rooms / that I only remember in midst of the dream of the house / with hidden rooms.” The oneiric architecture between personal picturesque and cathedral sublime folds into itself, even as it expands through generations, from pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century when “Vassily Zvyozdochkin carved the first matryoshka doll.” The murdered and martyred are also carved into that history of “dreams nested inside each other / like matryoshka dolls.”
“The Smell of Smoke” shapes Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue.” “Akedah” uses tercets to challenge Christian anti-Semitism, while “Hineni” echoes the Hebrew Bible amidst “the echoing spaces of Europe’s cathedrals.” Her central poem, “Cathedral/Grove,” uses tercets to plumb the history of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral with voices “coming from under the earth.” She explores historic roots of praise and lamentation. This girding of the sublime is surrounded by picturesque sections of “Survival Kit” with their witty personification of fruit, vegetables, and kitchen utensils, accompanied by delightful sketches. The concluding poem, “After Pasternak,” comes full circle in Glickman’s worldly walk through fields and groves of grace and gravity. “The sky stung by crows into sudden clamour / beyond the far fringes of branches, / black feathers sloughed from the ascending moon.” Her extensive branches reach beyond immediate apprehension and the burning clamour of cathedrals.
About the Author:
Susan Glickman's most recent book is Artful Flight: Selected Essays 1985-2019. She is the author of seven books of poetry, four novels for adults, three novels for children, and a work of literary history. She lives in Toronto where she works as a freelance editor and is learning to paint.
About the Reviewer:
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Publisher : Signal Editions (Sept. 21 2023)
Language : English
Paperback : 80 pages
ISBN-10 : 155065635X
ISBN-13 : 978-1550656350