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Temptation by Water

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The poems in Temptation by Water are tough and tender; funny sometimes, serious others; always imaginative and exquisitely crafted. Full of music, they are, finally, songs of the heart. I love this book for what it teaches me of life and grief and desire. Don't miss it.

Diane Lockward's Temptation by Water is a wonderful read for its depth, variety of subject matter and sound. There are poems of loss, desire, and humor. Her tone is both intimate enough and distant enough to bear irony's smart sheen. This is a difficult balance to achieve and Lockward does so with great skill.

The poems of loss are deeply moving. In "Without Words for It," Lockward uses the extended metaphor of grammar: "Without the noun of his name, no need/for adjectives to perk things up, less for adverbs." In "How Sarah Wins the Essay Contest," Lockward uses the rational structure of an essay in a way that contrasts and highlights a girl's deep sense of abandonment. And in her poem, "Implosion," the heart breaks the way a power plant implodes, "No fire, no flames, no heat./Just the soft mushroom of dust and ash,/The quiet collapse inside." There is a finely crafted tension in this book between the desire for intimacy and for solitude. In the title poem, "a kind of paradise, not one human in sight" and then a poem that is all desire, "The Very Smell of Him."

There are many playful poems. One called "Happy Hour" ends with these stunning lines, "Let the engines idle,/the dark roads remain untraveled./Let the hands of the clock hold us." And a poem called "Leaving in Pieces" that begins with a comic call to Kafka, "One morning I awoke/and found myself married/to a bald man."

Lockward takes in the world deeply and widely whether she is writing about something as simple as an onion or as complex as the human heart.

I have been a fan of Diane Lockward since I read her book, Eve's Red Dress. Lockward is a poet whose work is accessible, engaging, and smart and this fourth book by Lockward doesn't disappoint! Temptation by Water is both poignant and humorous--something I truly appreciate about the best writing today--her work is able to deal with serious situations, but in a way that creates connection with the reader on many levels. In the title poem (which is an ekphrastic poem inspired by Henri Matisse's "The Open Window," Lockward writes:

She floats inside the frame,

like Alice free-falling down the hole, enters this

other world, leaves her work on the windowsill. . .

And we do enter this other world through Lockward's poetry. We float throughout the book, through loss and palm oil, humpty-dumpty and a full body massage, through the waves of happy hour, the Jesus potato, a weatherman who says "desire," but means "disaster." This is what I love about Lockward's latest book, we never know where we will end up, but she cares for her readers making sure we are always entertained and continually surprised by her vision and words. Truly a book for those who love seeing an ordinary world in an extraordinary way, Lockward does this and leaves me wanting more. Highly recommend!

Diane Lockward is no stranger to temptation. Author of Eve's Red Dress and What Feeds Us, she's back to seduce us again, whether it's by eye ("goldfinches bright as lemon peels"), mouth ("stuffed with crisps strips of gold"), ear ("the water's swoosh and moan"), skin (`your mother" . . . "remembers the peach she once powdered"), or nose ("hint of the gym and Irish Spring"). But the heart of the book is desire: "How desire and water can sweep us away, and how we are all / looking for someone to push back the waves, to grab hold of us, and help us / here, pressed to this earth." This is a seduction you won't feel guilty about in the morning. Between these two covers is a sensuous paradise for the reader's brain, eyes, and ears. Best of all, no calories are involved.

"Save your water and green vegetation," Lockward writes in The Temptation of Mirage: "What I want is the desert." But how can we argue with her when she presents the reader with the "eternity of sand" like "an open-air coffin," not to mention the cereus with "its creamy petals like white silk," the fruit "red as a splash of blood"? And that's the beauty of Temptation by Water. Beyond the subtly brilliant way in which these poems are ordered, the poems themselves shine with a crisp lyricism eclipsed only by their humanity and honest lack of pretension.

Right away with the first line of the first poem, Weather Report, Lockward lets us know that she knows exactly where we're coming from - but it's OK, because she's been there, too: "It's one of those nights when sleep / is elusive and the TV runs non-stop..." Now that she has our attention, you might expect her to follow this up with a dry, academic treatise on the meaning of life, or else a postmodern non sequitur that leaves us scratching our heads. Instead, Lockward defies our poetic expectations by being solidly, dependably real: she talks of a weatherman who, through a slip of the tongue, says that, "devastation results from desire." Perhaps no truer statement has ever been uttered.

But Lockward goes further, giving us a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of a man "who does push-ups / not to lift himself off the ground / but to hold down the earth..." following this up with the startling but poignant image of a woman "who stood in a burning building / and dropped her child out the window / believing someone would catch him..."

The ample humanity of Lockward's poems is obvious; what's perhaps more striking, though, is her sense of humor, as seen in Side Effects ("He came with a warning label. / He caused headache, dry mouth, / diarrhea, constipation, depression.... He was all trans fats and palm oil...") or these opening lines of Leaving in Pieces:

One morning I awoke

and found myself married

to a bald man.

The narrator goes on to detail what used to be the "lustrous" hair of her husband, conveying the humor and underlying rush of mortal recognition when "something / turned to nothing" and "there on the pillow" she was confronted by his "fully exposed skull." In short, it's a poem about aging and mortality - old subjects, sure, but what's fascinating and absolutely redeeming is Lockward's subtle clarity, the infectious joy she displays when writing about even the most mundane or potentially troublesome topics, her way of describing the world with her own distinctive brand of pedestrian, Zen-like beauty.

Though I rarely review poems in the exact order they appear in the book, the next poem bares mention, especially for the subtle, lyrical turns in the first stanza. After the tongue-in-cheek ruminations of the last poem, often seasoned with bald-faced romance ("We frolicked and then we slept..."), a casual reader might easily expect the next poem to follow the same aesthetic, perhaps expounding on the narration of the previous poem. But What He Doesn't Know begins with these odd, delightfully unexpected and imaginative lines:

This is the season of the centipede.

Concealed by night, he crawls

across the ceiling,

here to terrify but not to harm.

That last line is great, I think, because it foreshadows the genius turns to follow:

How easily he travels at breakneck speed,

up the drains and down the walls.

Each of his one hundred legs securely clings,

each foot so soft and light he sounds no alarm.

This is Lockward at her best: so good that she lulls readers into the best kind of auto-pilot, so that if you don't stop halfway through and switch your conscious brain back on, you'll miss the lyrical acrobatics that are taking place right in front of you. Here, in just a few lines, Lockward has managed to expand the readers' expectations for the entire book while, on the level of this single poem, evoking raw imagination followed by tension (perhaps a bit unsettling), then following that with non-assuming reassurance reminiscent of James Wright, Mary Oliver, William Carlos Williams, or Li Po.

This somewhat pastoral quality also takes on a slightly darker tone in pieces like A Murmuration of Starlings, a work of breathtakingly lyrical agility that describes dead birds falling from the air "like water balloons tossed blindly / from dormitory windows," in such a way that we cannot help but agree with Lockward when she asks, "Do we not already think of the fallen, / earth's fields littered with corpses?"

Clearly, this is a book of great range. "The ocean outside my window washes me clean," says the first line Capturing the Image, evoking a powerful, in-the-moment view of the air "scented with seaweed and salt." But Lockward's next poem, The Jesus Potato, manages to poke fun at a story from FoxsNews.com while maintaining a certain underlying feeling of nondenominational spirituality - quite a feat in any time or political climate.

These are generous poems, sure, but what's also of interest to me is their underlying sense of courage. It's the courage to see the beauty in the "abandoned power plant in Tampa" and how it "fell in on itself... like disaster in slow motion," but it's also a brand of courage exemplified by the previously mentioned poem, What He Doesn't Know, which ends on lines that personify, I think, what we all aspire towards, yet Lockward's poetic aesthetic embodies with seemingly effortless humility and grace:

He has no poetry, no art, no songs,

but knows no fear when darkness enters a room.