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5.0 out of 5 stars
Why YOU want I WANT THIS WORLD, March 27, 2002
This review is from: I Want This World (Perfect Paperback)
Fairy godmothers and guardian angels protect. They bring "their" loved ones into a safe world where only good things happen - or where bad things turn to good. In I Want this World, good and bad things happen - and are turned into poems. The perceptions that Margaret Szumowski brings takes the reader into a variety of worlds that are each real, sometimes painful, always vibrant, and often joyful. I once took a class on antiques. Our instructor told us that to recognize antiques, we had to remember everything we had ever seen. In I Want this World we see a master remember everything that has ever had an emotional effect on her. She is willing and happy to share these memories with us - to extend her experiences into our lives. Equally, she is able to weave her memories into an imaginary universe, to take from reality and make Ruby, a recurrent alternate voice in this book, emerge whole, with an emotional present and a tangible life.
I Want this World offers character and plot. When I read it, I worried that someone would try to make a movie of some of the poems. I have trouble with that. Poems are events and the images that make them up fill this collection. I envision the people with whom I am sharing the moment. The poems help me recognize them - not always as themselves, but in their qualities, motivations, pain, and joy. I see these people as they move throughout the book, sometimes starring in a stanza, a whole poem, or several poems, and in other cases having a supporting role. Some characters exist only as referred-to names. Each of these people lives in my imagination. The houses, roads, towns, rivers, beaches and markets that we visit are real and vital, too. These people continue to live outside the lines of the poem. Their world is mine to understand and visit.
Place is important to Margaret Szumowski. In I Want This World, she shares her travels to Africa, and a past and present Poland. She takes us to the banks of rivers, along hot dirt roads with dusty borders and to the American Southwest. She allows us to BE her for the moments of her poems. The sounds, the sights, the tastes and the rhythms of experience inform her verse, and we get to partake. We eat tomatoes, cabbage, coffee, bagels, pick apples, make applesauce, watch fruit crops ripen, value potatoes in new ways, learn about the birthright of mushroom knowledge.
She gives us the gifts of colors and textures, shows us light everywhere - in Poland, like a verbal Canaletto, in her own experience and in parental memory. Light happens in Africa, in West Texas, on Cape Cod, and in her childhood. She shares sweat, pain, helps us taste foods familiar and foreign. In "The Fish at Vista" beliefs sing throughout, taking us from experience to decision. The chosen path may not be everyone's. In "Take Any Light You Can" she shows us Race Point Beach on Cape Cod telling us about wind and light and strength. In that same poem (in fact, in that same stanza) she talks to her daughter. She reminds us that we move through time and space and light and that movement changes us and keeps us the same.
" the wind at Race Point is so strong,
it can lift a human from the ground,
and I want to be lifted in the wind.
You, too, my dancer.
I love to see you leap as if lifted by the wind."
She goes on to share with her own need for light, advising her daughter;
"One night in childhood I seized a flashlight and was punished.
Take a flashlight, a lantern, take any light you can."
She tells us in "Going Out to Greet Whatever Lives," how that same daughter as a young child caught fireflies, was a safe haven for small living creatures, and, swinging high at night, touched her toes to the moon.
In "Starry Night" we share space in all its connotations, and, again, light.
"stars magnified until we are thousands of years
closer to them than we have ever been before.
The whirling, spinning stars we ached for are
now close enough to burn us.
I did not know the cost,
night at its peak, excruciating light,
all of us humans, awake, awake."
Watch, also, her use of space on the page. Words flow through the pages of I Want this World carefully measured against the beige frame of paper. Again, the need for light - and the needs of light, come through to the reader.
Some poems, like "Under a Hazy Halfmoon," make us, along with Szumowski and her mother, wait for night vision to bring back the body's memory of how things were in childhood. Preparing to go down a remembered path in the dark, we find that;
"By daylight we wandered this forest
from the little tree house overlooking the river-
marsh birds and gold leaves-
it shook with our weight."
The poem on the page sparkles with lightness, with spaces between lines, between stanzas of varying lengths.
The poetry about her father moved me deeply. His travels through memory, his courage in finding something to come to in a new country, his comfort in comparing old to new and seeing value in each are great gifts. He shares with his grandson the joys of the stamp collector. The great thing is promise: "we promised never to lose, never to tear those stamps." There are promises to the reader, to the future and to the past.
Margaret Szumowski gives us the gift of her experience as it blends with her vision. I Want this World is our world and her world in a very short book. We visit throughout time and space with her, with her family and with her imagination.
A science fiction short story I read many years ago postulates a highly specialized world at war, where hospitalized soldiers are in comas. Some soldiers, though catatonic, manage to go to imagined pasts where poorly remembered knowledge combines with dreams. The commanding general wants to know more. An expert suggests that a poet would understand. Sadly, though, in that world, there are no poets left.
Today, perhaps more than ever, our poets need to be protected from this philistine reality. Let's start by preserving Margaret Szumowski.
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