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'Poetry in Dangerous Times' stands tall with lyrical, candid poems
The title of the book “Poetry in Dangerous Times: Two Women Two Worlds” suggests a sense of foreboding.
But for the two poets in the book, Demetria Martínez and Susan Sherman, those times — in the past and the present — don’t darken their lyrical, candid, penetrating poems.
On the contrary, their work stands tall.
“I think what Susan and I share is an understanding that writing poetry is an act of resistance, and as such it is an act of hope,” Martínez said in a phone interview from her home in La Cienega, near Santa Fe.
Sherman believes she has been living in dangerous times since 1939, the year she was born to Jewish parents in the United States.
That year marked the first of a series of major wars starting with World War II and the Holocaust, followed by the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sherman doesn’t stop there. She rolls in the current fighting in Gaza and in Ukraine.
“There have not been real interludes of peace,” Sherman said in a phone interview from her home in New York City.
The actions of President Donald Trump in his current presidency, to her, represent a clear political reason that our country is experiencing life in dangerous times.
She notes that Trump’s role models are Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
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Sherman and Martínez each present a batch of new and selected poems in the newly published book.
Their diverse subjects include longing, family, remembrance, love and death, as well as hope and resistance.
Here is “Borders,” a Martínez poem of resistance:
“Someday borders will be no more
Because too many people died crossing
Because still more people survived
Walls will come tumbling down
Monarch butterflies and children
Will dance among the ruins
Fields of sunflowers will spring
Up over the graves of the fallen
Their names — María, José, Jesús — will be inscribed
In a new poetry that will not let us forget.”
Here is a Martínez’s poem titled “Hope”:
“Sometimes the pain
Is so great that the word
Hope
Must be buried
In the dust
So for now
I offer these words
From my land
Cottonwood
Parsley, fig
Dandelion
Pink cosmos
I offer the
Howl
Of coyotes
The aroma
Of a bonfire
And a blue
Egg from the
Chicken coop”
(For Mark Rudd. In memoriam, Paul Rudd)
Martínez and Sherman first met in 1989 when Martínez attended a reading Sherman gave at Albuquerque’s Full Circle Books. They have been friends since then.
Sherman said her first love is music and it is the sound of the words when read and heard out loud that deeply informs her poetry.
Here is an excerpt from Sherman’s poem “There Was a Woman Once”:
“There was a woman once
who was more to me than words
any blending of alphabet and sound
We met at the corners of day
In the space where night crosses light
Where shadows fall into darkness
The moments between our meetings
were air Fifty years lie between her
And this poem a length of time
Impossible to render…”
Zach Hively, founder of Casa Urraca Press, which published the book, said “Poetry brings ideas and experiences of our communities to life. And these are poems that anyone can access.”
The initial section of the book is a “dialogue” between the two poets.
Besides being a poet, Sherman is a memoirist, an essayist, a playwright, an activist, co-founder of IKON magazine and was poetry editor of The Nation and The Village Voice.
Martínez is a novelist, essayist, short story writer and an activist. She was a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal and the National Catholic Reporter.
