Beware, Poet Gregg Brings Cantaloupe and Machete to Her Every Reading
by Richard J. Hilber
The concept of fruition should be a kindly warm feeling to those in senescence as life has treated one with success and one can savor the rewards (hopefully not indulging in self-satisfaction). Keep in mind the word "fruition" and this collection may work for you. The title of this collection is Suddenly Autumn (to purchase this collection see note at the bottom of this review). That title suggests autumn could sneek up on us, or for that matter old age could sneek up on us. Can it? (I know for me its cumulative and overlapping my years of maturity which overlap still active moments of immaturity.)
The theme of this collection is an appreciation of one's having come into one's senescence (see "Senescence" the poem at page 30 of the collection). The focus then would be on an understanding of how one grows worse with age, mentally and physical, or not, as it's likely uneven. Some would experience a growth in spirituality as they reclaim it having either shed it or parse it to death in living through adolescence and adulthood.
The poet conceptualizes this time in her life (presumably age 62 at time of composition) as a time of new beginnings (see the title poem which presents first). The placement of the poem entitled "Suddenly Autumn" first in the collection signals this collection of poems is meant to be thematic. So the tennis net is in place and the success of this undertaking in play. The poet is not to be let off the hook upon which she would hang her proverbial cap!
The theme is revisited in the poem "September Getaway" (p. 35). The poem is everything I expect of lyrical poetry. It has scope and depth of feeling and appreciation of one's relationship to beauty and to nature. Enough said. Buy the book if only to read this poem and treasure it.
As the reader soon grasps, the poet Gregg is a poet of the globular fruit school. This is fortunate for the theme because fruit is typically to be harvested in autumn. So perhaps the poems in the collection using fruit will deserve a free pass (but not if I can help it, they won't). If a poem uses the imagery of fruit, does it advance the thematic fullness (or its opposite) of senescence, or does it not?
To show we readers that she knows her gig (this poet is also a stand-up comic),
by the fourth poem in the collection she rewinds a biograhic anecdote of Cezanne and his penchant for apples in his paintings. She infuses the anecdote with a supposition. Cantaloupe, while stunning when at first sliced apart, fails the artist's need for repose during his artistic efforts. This would be the equivalent of a model, let's say Twiggy, who manages the perfect imp smile but only fleetingly and so quickly as to not indulge the camera's lens speed (even when increased to the hummingbird at a stand still speed). Modeling does have its place in these poems (see "The Nudes" at page 24) and how the realist succeeds in art that comes to life, leaps off the page back into life.
This poet is sure of her fruit ("Cezanne can have his apples, I'll have my cantaloupe.") By the time the reader catches up to the poet, the poem to catch is on page 17, and is entitled "Thoughtful Voyeur: Woman and the Cantaloupe." This is one of the poems selected by Keillor for performance and publication. Its persona is the woman, every woman, in her kitchen attuned to the beautiful in the disclosure of the innards of a cantaloupe. As a man, I'd like to say, it's a persona that is the woman inside all of us who have to go about the mundane chores persisting in experiencing the world with our sensuous longings for beauty while we do so. For a manly man to want to slice open such a fruit he might want to do it behind closed doors and hopefully not have mistaken his true love for a cantaloupe (sorry about the macabre elicited by slicing fruit; it's the mischief latent in all the globular fruit imagery, right?).
Globular fruit poets if they are smart mix it up a bit. They throw in bulbs, as in onion and garlic bulbs, vegetables not fruits. So in "Winter Garlic" (p. 32) she mixes it up a bit! The poem's persona is the woman in her kitchen again but this time the empathy she feels is palpable for the separating of cloves of the garlic reminds her of orphans alone and apart from parents and siblings. One is reminded that fruits are evocative of passion and vegetables of compassion. I can not picture a senescence in which I have not evolved in my empathy for others. This poet is a free range chicken poet. She will go where she has to go, literally speaking in the kitchen, to find the meanings of senescence such as in the imperatives of savoring beauty as our days in number decrease. Also, our true fear of aging should be a dotage marked by sterility, of a life without empathy for others. (Belief in afterlife provides no relief to those without empathy be ye Buddhist or Christian, Muslim or Jew [atheists get a pass on this one and possibly theists].)
What more is there to do with the word fruit than to deal with its exuded self: fruition. One of her poems upon a subtle reading will disclose the tendency in the poet's work to exude as from the repose of fruit, fruition. See in the poem "Absence" (page 36) that personal loss of the loved one in which the pain is often palpable as a globed fruit is found not in a fruit but in the globe of the persona's human heart, the residence of the ache (in the geography of the emotions, not to be found in dissecting cadavers). I want to say this poem begs the need for an amputation of something. It has to do with absence, of a limb missing from our self which was made whole by conjoining with another. The nerve endings are raw and we suffer loss. That's heart rending and imagine coming into senescence and not have experienced such a loss. Would one not have missed out on the experience of what it means to be alive and to suffer the loss of fullness, of having become more fully realized as a person? This awareness of loss is part of living. See especially her poem "Purple Heart" (p. 49) if you need to see any further into the truth of experiencing fullness in life.
This brings me to my second favorite poem in the entire collection: "Sympathy Card" (p. 42). Aunt Lina has survived her adult daughter and things are out of all bounds, sad. Can a sympathy card even broach the subject without being maudlin and cheap emotionalism? I note that the persona niece in the poem is careful of her detachment from the suffering while not incapable of a matched empathy for her aunt, honestly sympathetic in her reserve. Acknowledging loss of another takes courage, a courage not usually required of etiquette. In this context a carelessly mailed sympathy card is as likely to tear out the heart of the bereaved as not. Better keep the language spare and remember to check in on her when all the brouhaha of wakes and funerals has passed.
Now my favorite poem follows from this one, the metaphorical celebration of the private psyche: "Aunt Rose" (p. 51). In this the persona's relative, we find the exemplar of the hidden life of those in senescence. Beauty is masked and the container is labeled severe (like the husk of a cantaloupe, my dear), but inside is the fullness of life, the enduring possession of what has a life of its own, beauty.
[A]t night she looses
over the pillow,
a sudden autumn
against winter's
coarse, muslin white.
And so we now know that the poets appreciation of the aging process is inclusive of not just loss of physical and mental capacity, of relationships gone awry, but also of the empathy which makes life ever so bearable and livable and suicide is no solution for one who feels empathy and would keep company with those who also live long and would do no less than our forebears who chose life minimalized, but no less to be lived. Odd that the maximizing of our years as a corollary includes a minimizing of our capacities.
As I said earlier: "Globular fruit poets if they are smart mix it up a bit." Poet Gregg continues to look for other globular images, not just fruits and vegetables. In "K-Mart Map" (p. 37), she uses the poet's own persona who buys a three ring binder for her poems the cover of which is a flattened out into a globular map (projection of regions in cloves of the surface of the planet). The wisdom of this poet is that she knows the map may help her gloss the evening news of mishaps and tragedies a world away, but her poems inside this cover focus on the appreciable experience of beauty. It's where we all should be so lucky to go when woes and travail about swamp our lives with no life preserver or oars but yet the prospect of beauty (which in this poem is about perusing and reading from the page in collected poetry with the poem about the three peaches in the sunlight). We have to be careful of escapism, but a healthy psyche requires too that we stay balanced between not just good and evil, but also futility and beauty. I do not believe this poet is into escaping consequence of mortality, of loss, or of one's own proclivity for endurance into one's old age (senescence in the calendar sense).
Afterword. Finally, without glossing every poem's place in this collection, I can answer the question as to whether Poet Gregg can hang her cap on this collection of poems as a unified collection of superb poems. Time has not changed that for me as I reflect back to the time I read her poems during a wonderful summer afternoon in advance of autumn on a screened deck. I had a very pleasant evening reflecting on her success as I wrote this review last July 10, 2011.
Richard J. Hilber, Thursday, April 12, 2012.
Availability Note. Suddenly Autumn by Cindy Gregg is available for purchase. See
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