Books — The Irreversible Sun

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. 

The Irreversible Sun

Shirley Geok-lin Lim, West End Press (2015)

Find this book here. Check out more of Lim’s work here.

Just before I left on sabbatical, my university and department welcomed poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim to campus for our annual lecture series. I was not familiar with her work before the event and, given the pressure of trying to tie up all my loose ends to leave for several months at the end of the term, I didn’t have time to read up before she came to read.

I did, however, purchase her book The Irreversible Sun on the strength of what I heard her read that night and it was the first thing I read after I filed my grades for the fall term and leaned into setting my course for all my projects.

It felt a bit providential, if I’m being honest. Lim’s work in this collection is a meditation on the external environments of Southern California all of us experience if we would but slow down and pay attention to it. If we would care for it more intentionally.

This encouragement to deep observation—an element in every poem throughout the text—landed in my mind at the exact moment I was turning over an essay that required the same level of focus on the peculiarities of California’s climate, particularly the drought culture. I literally stopped mid-stanza while reading her poem “California Sun” and scrawled notes on my essay and her poem before returning and re-reading the following lines multiple times.

“Paradise is thirsty this November.

Seven months without rain, it’s sober,

a drunk without a drink. Still, tourists

come for sun and ocean, list

rare wine in pretty bottles,

pretty girls in bare sandals

and smiles….”

Most of Lim’s work carries this seemingly straightforward delivery of the sublime. It is not ornamented so much as subtly styled toward the objects of her fascination as likely to be found on her morning walks as they are in spaces demarcated as particularly meaningful.

This is the power of quiet poetry. Sometimes, it exerts a force on our preexisting concerns in such a way that it clarifies what reams of explanation and prose cannot. These moments are epiphanous. And for me, the lightning bolt was this:

Thirst and hunger, rest and fatigue, all are imbalanced in the mind of the tourist and the tyrant, both of which are roles we sometimes play without intending to or recognizing that’s what we’re doing. 

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.