Foxglovewise
I knew years of taking poetry classes without any new names would be worth it someday! I have found a lovely little book by the name of Foxglovewise by Ange Mlinko through an American Women's Poetry class I'm taking this semester, and I'm in love with it. I'd like to talk about two poems in particular that stood out to me: "The Open C" and "Radishes".
You stare into it for days, all your life,
as if waiting for a curtain to rise.
"The Open C" is so wonderful to read due to its arrangement in the volume. The poems that proceed it are anchored in place and time; they read almost like travel blogs. We're planted in Scotland, uprooted and replanted in London, then uprooted and replanted in Texas. All the same, we know where we are and when we are. "The Open C", however, shocks us with its scale. We're suddenly shot up to a planetary, birds-eye view and are asked unanswerable existential questions. Mlinko's voice has been present throughout, though she takes care to fade herself into the background of the location and its associations she is describing. This poem brings her center. She gives commands. She is bigger than you or I, and yet she is still just as human as ever.
Smoke and ash of November.
A landscape of sediment and char,
lead and gold leaf, mutilated sod
racing on its planetary camber.
On a kitchen table’s crude altar
a bowl of radishes is offered
"Radishes" begins with a similarly planetary scale, but quickly shrinks down to the childhood kitchen. The poem is a work of memory, eulogy, and grief. Though the taste and memory of the radish is deeply personal to Mlinko, the feeling of chasing a childhood joy— only to find the sensation has waned— is so widely applicable it is universal and existential. The end of the poem, "good to gnaw / a vegetable so filial and feral / late in the year, when the knife is duller", is violent and visceral. The memory is so tangible its edible, but the seasons go on, the planet spins, and things fade; people fade. Yet every November, she remembers all the same. I think we all have our own kind of radishes, don't we?