In the Volcano's Mouth - Miriam Bird Greenberg (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press

Today's book of poetry:

In The Volcano's Mouth.  Miriam Bird Greenberg.  Pitt Poetry Series.  University of Pittsburgh Press.  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  2016.

Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2017 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters

It's two days in to the new year and Today's book of poetry finds himself outside of a medical clinic shortly after eight in the morning.  I'm in a warm car, the engine running and I have Miles, Trane and the Cannonball keeping me company.  An old friend is in the clinic doing clinic stuff.

Knowing I'd be here a while, it's -25C which is why I'm keeping the car running instead of enjoying the heated waiting room in the clinic, I brought along Miriam Bird Greenberg's In the Volcano's Mouth.  If I'd known what was about to happen I might not have bothered with turning on the heat.

This is why Today's book of poetry got into this game.  Let the banners fly and the bells ring, call out the trumpets, because Today's book of poetry is opening the year with a stunner.

Miriam Bird Greenberg is a beautiful poetry monster.  How else to describe the delicious havoc these poems leave in their tidy wake, how else to describe these powerhouse narratives that arrive at their harsh conclusions so gently?  Greenberg totally disarms the reader with one sweep of her disarming brush and then knocks them all over with the return pass.

Would You Believe

                     Three blocks from the Cyprus Freeway in Oakland,

                          which collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake,

                          with a line by Susan Moon

We climbed from the mouth of a volcano

all year, the year I moved west with my sweetheart

to live three blocks from where the earth had broken

open. Men in the Acorn Projects

remembered pulling strangers

trapped in their cars to safety. Brother,

one told me he'd said, we can be afraid

of each other again tomorrow. Twenty

years past, they'd made good

on their promise. By then I waited weekly in a food line

alongside Chinese immigrant women who fished

plastic bottles from the trash, eyes

roving for a coin, a lost prize, at the curb. Sometimes

I'd lift my hand to the lip--

look out over the volcano's rim, and there,

in a crevice, a scrap of paper, shining:

                                                someone's private prayer

or prophecy. Everybody held out

hope, tended their small hustle. Women knocked

on the door selling broken-heeled shoes, loquats

picked in an abandoned yard, would try the knob

if no one was home. Could I make change

for a twenty, asked someone, unfolding one

she'd manufactured from a dollar bill.

                                               Would you believe

what lengths I went to, to call myself

happy then?                  Star of blood that blooms

beneath a bruised fingernail, star

of silence left high in the heart of a room

after the door's slammed. A couple sits, watching

one another's reflections in a mirror. The two

talk like this as evening falls

around them, and neither has the heart

to get up and turn on the light. "My body's here

but no one's in it." writes a friend; for me

it's different. I'd spent my childhood

in a house made of bees; on hot days honey

dripped through cracks in the ceiling. Me, I hummed,

coiled tight. It hadn't been long since I'd slept

in a creosote field while grainers crashed

in the switchyard nearby. Actual tumbleweeds

turned like prayer wheels crossing the tracks

and the constellations coyotes called to,

streaked across the night, were more miraculous

than freckles on the face of god. Around then,

hitchhiking past Death Valley, a pair of truckers

stopped for me. I used to haul cattle

to LAX, one said. But I couldn't take looking

into their mournful eyes anymore. I guess I wear my heart

on my sleeve, he said. They were climbing

through the Sierras to pick up a load of honey, telling jokes,

they both had wild white beards. I hadn't yet come

in my life to peer over the lip of a volcano,

I wasn't yet made of cicada's coils

and tymbal. Still, I carried a bit of string, a quipu I used

for eavesdropping on the passage of time.

If someone had put a knife in my hands, even then,

I'd have taken it.                                  I can hear

two birds quarreling, tangled in midair. I'm afraid

one day I'll find myself trash picking, tearing

corners from a twenty. I'm afraid I'm no longer

lost as the runaway I met hopping a train

out of Colton that summer

who carried a small jar of her own baby teeth

with her in her pack.

...

Today's book of poetry is tickled to bring such a high-stepping collection up to bat for our first book of the year.  It's too early for any "best book" of the year comparisons but we are certain In the Volcano's Mouth will be part of that discussion.  This is superb poetry.

Greenberg writes poems that are full of new information that feel like old knowledge, these poems feel like a modern folk tale happening in real time, stories we've known all along.  It's not quite haunting but it is close to unnerving as Greenberg unleashes her formative artillery and these poems spill out in front of us like accidents that were meant to happen, prophecies we are only hearing about now.

A Thousand Wire Humming

My room is hemmed with rain; otherwise its windows

are a scrim of moths pressed

            against the light, tracing feverishly

their dizzy script, and I am made from shadows

they cast,

            passport stamps from Moldova

and Suriname. If you passed me working

at a telephone box on the corner, a thousand wires

            humming, and I

in my mechanic's jumpsuit, phone co.

logo over the breast pocket, you'd never glance back

            twice. One night I sat drinking

on someone else's porch

after a rainstorm. The light was off, it was late, and no one

            came home. The moon cast my dim shape

into the yard, and the clouds racing over it

were skittish

            as rabbits. I am getting ready

to see you--shaving

my legs, painting my fingernails

             and my toes. I put on a black lace bra

you've never seen me wear. I've held the throat

of an animal,

             and broken its neck. I'm climbing

out of my skin. One night

      a woman I knew immersed herself in a bath

             of India ink, came out

darker than the rafters

of a empty house. Her mouth

             burned red, open as instinct

makes a fledgling's mouth open, and her ankles

were more beautiful

             than a sapling bent

by wind. More beautiful than the new body

of a snake emerging

            from its winter skin in the rafters. Somewhere far off

I can hear the sound of a telephone

ringing in an empty house.

             Don't empty houses ring? Listen

how echo inhabits a place it knows

no one's home. Sometimes on the subway

             you catch sight of someone familiar--your eyes meet

but there's nothing to say that won't be swallowed

by the throng.

             Your shadows are tangled

in the legs of the crowd, are talking already, or fighting,

or fucking. Whatever you wish for

             in secret, and each one's ankles

are more beautiful than the other's. Do you remember

the morning when,

             before I'd laid the iron to my work clothes,

you pinned one arm

behind my back? Something trembled

              in the palm of your other hand--

an egg yolk--and you poured it

into my mouth. Breath

              chasing breath's dizzy script,

it was slippery in my throat

as a minnow passing through your fingers

              into shadow, as a paw print

on the loamy creek bank

tires of the rain

               that erodes it, and I became a swarm

of dust-winged moths

then that filled the air where a moment before

               my shape had stood.

...

Our first morning read of the new year had to wait until the afternoon.  More snow and slow minions meant for a later start than normal to our poetry world.  Milo, our head tech, was all Campbell McGrath happy as Santa brought him three early McGrath titles.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, was happy because I told her the David Lee had another book in the offing.  She likes to refer to him as Sir David of Lee, and rightly so.

The rest of the staff seemed to have made it through those damned reindeer and Fat Man in Red.  Miriam Bird Greenberg brought everything into focus real quick.  Milo was the first to say it out loud when he said "if In the Volcano's Mouth is any indication of what is ahead in 2018 we are in for one hell of a year."

Living in the End Times

We sat in the ruins

                       and made tea from the flowers.

Who among us knew

                       anything? The mourning machine

sowed furrows in the distance

                       and a little while later came the mourning machine

to reap what had grown. There

                       at the edge of the field

crouched some children, ready

                       to dash through the field stubble

to pick through the wrecked rabbits' burrows

                       the machine had uncovered, then left behind.

...

Miriam Bird Greenberg writes with such clarity that it breeds instant familiarity, gives instant access to the undercurrents, the swirl darkly at the edges of all these poems, she is almost tender about it.  Today's book of poetry is excited to start 2018 with such an outstanding books of poems.  This is Greenberg's first book but it never shows, before she is done you will want to have every word she has written.

Greenberg's In the Volcano's Mouth is a book you'll want on your poetry shelf, you'll want Greenberg in your poetry brain.

Today's book of poetry starts the year with a bang.  Miriam Bird Greenberg's In the Volcano's Mouth will cook your poetry brain from the inside out.

   ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Miriam Bird Greenberg teaches creative writing and English as a second language. She is the author of two chapbooks, All Night in the New Country and Pact-Blood, Fevergrass. Greenberg has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and The Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Missouri Review, and in the anthologies Best New Poets 2014 and The Queer South. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she lives in the San Francisco Bay area. BLURBS “These poems do what the best poetry sometimes does: reveal and deepen our understanding of the strangeness in the ordinary. And do so in language clear as a bell.”      —Ed Ochester, judge “In the Volcano’s Mouth is rich with mysterious and heartrending images. Miriam Bird Greenberg blends scraps of the harshness of life, of what would be ugly in less skillful hands, with the beautiful, even beatific. These are poems that are acutely aware of the world: The flame/of a match that flares/at the tip of his cigarette/before he draws in his breath/deepens the darkness/that falls just beyond/ his illuminated face. Paul Eluard wrote, ‘There is another world and it is in this one.’ These poems give us a glimpse into that world. They are poems I will come back to for inspiration.”      —Ellen Bass “Although many of the poems in this haunted book are ‘pastoral’ in a Classical sense, the natural world is not a place of peace and serenity. Rather, it’s unstable, a setting not devoid of meaning, but a realm where meaning is always on the move, like the many characters wandering through this book, and the mind of the poet who has carefully made it. These poems are harrowing and wounding, and yet retain a quiet, sustaining reserve of beauty.”       —Maurice Manning                                      Miriam Bird Greenberg @ Quiet Lightning Video: Evan Karp upress.pitt.edu 646 DISCLAIMERS Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission. We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies" and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration