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"Shimming the Glass House" is a book not to be missed
"Shimming the Glass House" There are a stack of books awaiting my review right now, some of which I have not started even to read, so it seems odd perhaps that I would jump right to the front of the line with a new book of poetry that just came to me in the mail yesterday. "Shimming the Glass House", however, has a few advantages over the other books I am currently reading for the purposes of book reviews, book that span the range of topics from poetry to Civil War battles to steamboats in Florida. In Helen Pruitt Wallace's "Shimming the Glass House" we find a short book (as are most contemporary books of poetry) and one that invites the reader right in, then keeps him there a spell to enjoy and muse over the truths it presents. In other words, once I started reading "Shimming the Glass House" it was very difficult to put it down. I read straight through the entire book last night, then paged back through certain poems that were outstanding to me, and then this morning revisited the rest of the book. "Renovating an Old House After the World Changed" was probably the poem that foremost stood out in my mind, a lovely albeit expectedly sad musing on the attacks of 11 September 2001. Topics of great gravitas such as 9/11 are difficult for writers, even poets, to address with a sincere warmth that doesn't seem overly done or trite. What can you say in the wake, especially in the immediate days following, such a horrible event? How can you keep your anger, fear, sadness, and hope all in check and reach out to readers with thoughts and feelings at once unique, personal, but yet universal? Of all the writing I've read on 9/11, nothing compares to Wallace's poems in this slim collection that address this horrible day in our nation's history. When she writes of how simple and unimportant her renovations of her old house seem in contrast to the world-reaching events of 9/11, Wallace in the most literal terms brings the attacks home to all Americans. When she speaks of watching the fading moon in the pre-dawn glow of an awaiting sunrise, she could be any one of us standing on our front porch or in our backyards on 12 September 2001. Not all of Wallace's poetry takes on grand and newsworthy events though: her poem "My Son, Age Eight, Makes Tacos" is a beautiful piece that reflects a mother's love with nothing but the most true of emotions and compact of thoughts. In the everyday action of watching her son help make dinner, Wallace observes so much of what parenting is all about, and with no coy tricks but only honest observation she shares what she witnesses with us. Connecting this poem and the one about 9/11 above, I gather a greater picture of this poet, this woman who is going about the same tasks we all do in everyday life but happens to hold the sacred talents to put these events down on paper in a way that is brighter than a photograph and more sincere than a young minister. Wallace writes of a surgeon turned patient, a man undergoing an operation much like many he himself performs each day. She writes of an undertaker's gentle task of preparing the dead and how holy such a chore is in the wake of the life of the person who, now that his life is over, has become the undertaker's client. "Those Who Chose to Jump", a poem about the poor souls in the Twin Towers who, on 9/11 with no rescue in sight, elected to jump to their certain deaths, approaches its topic with a level of respect worth studying by any poet who ever dares to write about such serious, difficult, and personal subjects. The breath-taking quality of Wallace's work is that while she never is afraid of taking on difficult topics, she also never resorts to difficult or overwrought prose in doing so: her plain language reminds me of the gospel singer and songwriter Twila Paris, another woman exceptional in her talents when comes to crafting verse of beauty out of some very tough topics. "On the Suwannee" is a poem that takes on nature's beauty with as much energy and open emotion as Wallace spends elsewhere on complex topics of current events and family life and in approaching this famed river, no stranger to literary attention itself, Wallace sends out a letter, a detailed postcard, of the river and her experience with it. Poets perhaps have always been the foremost writers to find notes and hints of the great and massive in the small and mundane, but Wallace expertly crafts work which will cause us to ponder some very nuanced topics out of seemingly open and easy subject matter. In her poem "Sixth Grade Science Fair" she turns from the very real and pragmatic ordeal of the middle school science fair to considering what such a fair that took into account all the most serious questions of the universe would be like: in doing so, Wallace moves the vast spectrum of professional science's most difficult challenges into the arena of the budding sixth grade scientist and realizes that perhaps the greatest of questions and the snaller ones have more in common than we ever thought. Though Wallace lives in St. Petersburg and her writing, such as the poem concerning the Suwannee, here and there demonstrates a concern and knowing zest for Floridian subjects, she has not, thankfully, in this collection roped herself into a corner as a Florida poet. There are many artists, poets certainly included, who address Florida's natural bounty with grace and talent and I am the first appreciate this application of skill and concern for our state, but I also appreciate that Wallace is able to write about 9/11 in such a way that she could be penning her thoughts from any home in America. She writes, really, for America. Her sixth grade science fair is not unique to Florida nor is her empathy for the victims of terrorism. Her ability to present poems on, say, Fort DeSoto Beach alongside ones which span the universal experience of contemporary life positions her in the rare atmosphere of a writer very real to us due to both her actual, real-life, position on a map and also due to her ability to move beyond that position. So many readers I know are shy in coming to poetry and when they do, they tend to seek out the "greats" such as Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost over current American writers. This is a shame, with nothing taken away from the talents of a Dickinson or a Frost, the window that poets such as Helen Pruitt Wallace provide us on our own lives is unique and I think a real treasure. Reading her poems in the middle of the night I was given the superb, rare, gift of being able to see my own life in a slightly differnt manner and that is, beyond great verse or lofty ideals, I believe the most worthwhile things a poet can really offer the reader. "Shimming the Glass House" is a book not to be missed.
MIKE WALKER is a writer who reviews books for this and other publications and writes also about ecology, natural, and social history. He is also a poet, with his most recent publication being in the Fall 2008 edition of the Tipton Poetry Journal. He lives in Gainesville, Florida. Mike can be reached via email at: cloudrace@prontomail.com |
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