Customer Reviews

Recipe for Blackberry Cake (Wick Poetry Chapbook Series, Ser. 2, No. 6.) (Wick Poetry Chapbook Series 2)

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Diane Gilliam Fisher, Recipe for Blackberry Cake (Kent State University Press, 1999)

There is a term in horse racing, "run", that describes not just the basic act of running but putting on a real burst of speed relative to one's competitors; a one-run horse will just run his eyeballs out until he's exhausted, or will save all his energy to crank up an exciting stretch drive. The horse you really want to see, though, are the two-run horses; they range up and threaten early, then drop back to cruising speed, only to come on again at the end. Two-run horses (and the rare, elusive three-run horse, of which we see maybe one a generation) are the stuff dreams are made of. Unfortunately, one cannot say the same of two-run books, of which Recipe for Blackberry Cake is a prime example. It starts off with a poem that seems as if it's going one direction, and gradually shifts to another. It's a wonderful piece of work, and I was thinking that if the whole book were as cleverly constructed, it would be one of my books of the year. This didn't happen; the book dropped back to cruising speed, taking the second emotion from the first poem and running with it. We get a good deal of message poetry and tell-don't-show in there, which doesn't help matters. Then, all the sudden, we get the second run with the very last poem.

"I take a notion to look up for it, into the evening sky.
I don't know any gods or goddesses, so I will say
that to the east, where night has stained darkest
is where she drained the berries. I'll say those four
high stars set like cornerstones are the table where she worked,
and that low, roundish cluster of near and far stars
is the gleam of berries in her bowl...."
("After Grandma Novi's Recipe for Blackberry Cake Is Lost at the Press and There's No Place Left to Look")

And man, does it work.

This is one of Kent State's Wick chapbooks, so the space between first poem and last actually isn't very large; it's worth picking up for those, and yo may well find you like what's in the middle better than I did. ***