Books — Paintings that Look Like Things

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Paintings that Look Like Things

Derek Updegraff, Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2018)

Find the books here and here. Check out Updegraff on his university page here.

Sometimes I read poetry because it is suggested to me, sometimes because I encounter it out in the wild, and sometimes because the author joins the department where I work. Such was the case with Paintings that Look Like Things, a collection by my newest colleague Derek Updegraff.

Reading through the pieces in this book, I was constantly moved by small moments that call the reader’s attention back to the present tense in the face loss, of love, of life, and of the things we long for. These moments are realized, usually, too late for the person at the center of the poems. 

For example, this piece of “Between Pit Stops at Late-night Diners:”

                          “Now in uncertainty,

let’s keep each of our shorter hopes at hand

but not neglect the long ones we have planned” (29).

Or these lines from “On This Loss:”

“He’d pictured some things right when the day came,

but he misremembered the one who’d shoulder

his absence….” (16)

Or this moment in the first of “Four Exeter Book Poems (from the Old English):”

“In carefree conversations we so often claimed

that nothing could divide the two of us

but death alone. Well that has been undone” (41).

What I appreciate in Derek’s work here is his ability to ball up the energy his pieces quietly build and then release it in these stark, clear moments of insight that redirect the reader’s focus from the people they find in the stanzas to their own lives.

In essence, he captures that moment when what we see in the lives of the people around us unexpectedly aligns with something we’d forgotten we needed to remember. This is not an easy response to elicit, and he does it consistently.