Jessica
The Spring Ghazals by poet and musician Jack Hayes, is a meditation on loss, memory and time. Throughout the poems, Hayes conjures a world filled with well-worn beauty. The details of this beauty, from the color of spring wildflowers to the taste of familiar foods, contrast with the melancholy that is at the root of many of his poems. These specific, evocative details are the greatest strength of this volume of poetry. As a reader, I was inspired by the precision of his details, especially as they helped me to create an emotional (as well as physical) landscape.
The book is broken into four movements: Spring Ghazals, Kitchen Poems, Helix Poems and Cloudland. Each movement presents a different perspective on either the past affair that inspired the book or the narrator’s current life. Each section stands well on its own, but taken together they trace an arc of grief and acceptance over time.
The first section, Spring Ghazals, details the aftermath of a tumultuous affair. All of the poems in this section take on a loose ghazal form. Stanzas are in couplets and each couplet relates tonally, but not in overt subject matter. These ghazals are voiced by a bruised and hurting narrator. The details in the poems are seen through the lens of loss and grief. For example, in Ghazal 5/3, the narrator observes: “…I’m walking thru glass almost unscathed the Conservatory of // Flower’s glass dome on a gray spring morning…” Even surrounded by lush beauty, the narrator only sees the sharp glass and gray skies.
The second section, Kitchen Poems, finds the narrator in an entirely different emotional space. The poems here are distinctly more narrative and evoke a domestic comfort. Each poem (save the final poem) is titled with a different comfort food dish, like “Fondue”, “Macaroni Cheese”, and “Potato Salad”. Despite the warmer tone, the narrator’s loss still lurks here. In “French Toast,” the narrator hears Hank Williams playing in the background and he states: “my blue // heart my red heart my golden heart opens & closes & / shrinks & grows – the world I know the people I / hold in my heart as it grows & breaks…”
Helix Poems, the third section, may be my favorite. According to Hayes, the Helix Poems follow a form of his own devising. Each poem is written in tercets, and the poet describes new and different objects or animals on each line. Interspersed with these objects are personal observations. The effect is that the descriptions of the object build a picture of the emotional tone, which is then confirmed by the observation at the end. The poems are hypnotizing. They remind me, in some ways of the chants of Walt Whitman or the lists of Raymond Carver.
The final section of Cloudland feels like a bridge between the invocations of the Helix Poems and the domestic intimacy of the Kitchen Poems. In this section, the narrator provides a summation of and separation from his past wounds. In the title poem, the narrator asks, “Is poetry living in memory or is it fetching memory into the present moment? / Is it making a memory where past & present & future coalesce?” In this line, the narrator tips his hand at the book’s project, to capture memory and time within a poem or series of poems. While I read these poems, I recognized that the narrator will still be preoccupied by the past affair, but the poems have given him a space to explore his preoccupation.
Hayes’ book is a testimony to the power of poetry to distill and reexamine experience. The poems feel like a series of mile markers on a stretch of road. They are records of a longer journey, where as a reader, I knew I was only catching short glimpse. I look forward to seeing more.
