Embers
Reaching to lyric heights, Embers is an empathetic poetry collection that speaks to consequential universal experiences.
Howard Giskin’s somber poetry collection Embers concerns death, time, and memory.
Among the book’s poems are paeans to departed family members, nostalgic recollections of childhood in midcentury America, and Buddhist-inspired ruminations on the natural world. The speaker asks questions throughout about the fleeting nature of existence and about what can be saved. Their perspective is oriented both toward the future and the past, and individual entries search for redemption and continuity inside memories.
The entries take on traditional poetic formats, making use of long lines and techniques like enjambment. Many assume a ruminative pace. Their adherence to the plain style sometimes overwhelms their individual messages, though, leaving ideas swirling in seas of memory without transforming them into concrete thoughts or images. Further, as the collection continues, some poems tread the same ground as previous ones, belaboring points.
Where the book’s language is at its most restrained, memorable sounds and images come through. The penultimate stanza of “Racing” notes:
the
exigencies of life grew like mushrooms
after a spring rain. Strange small emptiness,
emblem of youth, circles on a track
that led nowhere and everywhere,
ascending spiral,
prayer wheel…
Indeed, the book’s sparsest poems pack the strongest punches, utilizing litanies in which precise descriptions of everyday sights and feelings fuse together to form powerful elegies. Among other impressions, “From a Distance” lists
A bat winging,
an eagle soaring,
blind mole crawling,
endless mirrors.
Anguish of knowing,
joy of the moment,
the infinite,
dying and being reborn.
The mode of unrecoverable loss governs many poems too. Their subjects include an aging mother, deceased relatives, and lineages lost in World War II. Often, they reach to lyric heights in their treatments of such intimacies, transcending time even as they freeze time and struggling against the feelings of emptiness that ensue when what was once present and cherished is no longer there. A similar spirit is brought to bear in the book’s imaginative ruminations upon settings and backdrops encountered in the course of travel, as with a poetic record of a visit to a New Zealand island:
On a beautiful lake, mountains in the
distance, supermarket, restaurants,
passable sidewalks, a small park, all
tidy and clean, our tiny apartment
with a kitchenette, but it’s the
flowering bush with a profusion
of pink and white blooms I recall
the best.
Reaching out with empathy to commune with others, Embers is a poetry collection that seeks solace from everyday pain through its engagement with universal questions.
Reviewed by
Sébastien Luc Butler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
