Title: How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Themes/Subjects: Self-Help, Travel, Inwardness, Loneliness, Death, Family Relationships, Memory, Love, Loss, Study of the Natural World, Mental Health
Three Words to Describe the Poems: Are they poems?
Blurb from Back of Book: ‘In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with “how to” poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins. Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders—birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees—all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves. Altogether, these are poems about transcendence: finding breath and lightness in life and the everyday acts of living. It’s all terribly easy and, as the title suggests, not entirely possible. Or at least, it is never quite finished.’
Summary and Comments: I will be blunt from the start: I did not like this collection of poetry.
There are many reasons for this, including the dubious labeling of some pieces in this collection as 'poems' when they should instead be called 'nonfictional fragments' or 'short essays,' but the main reason simply has to do with this: the poems aren’t well-written. They don’t sing with the lyricism that the blurb claims they do, and the themes and subjects are so often repeated page after page that they feel beaten half to death by the time the collection is finished.
The basic structure of the collection is simple: it is broken up into seven different sections, with each section having one overarching theme and/or subject. The first section, called ‘How to Fly,’ is a section that reads more like a self-indulgent physical manifestation of the concept of toying with language than anything else. In many poems, all starting with the name ‘How To’ before continuing on into some lesson (‘How to Have a Child,' 'How to Cure Sweet Potatoes,' 'How to Love Your Neighbor,' etc.), they read more as cliched poetic renderings of lessons that we have been taught by our parents since we were eight years old. Some of them, such as a poem called ‘How to Survive This,’ try to be deep—they pick heavy subjects, such as a deep personal loss, but then devolve into lines of cliché and sentimentality: ‘Remind me again / the day will come / when I look back amazed / at the waste of sorry salt / when I had no more than this / to cry about.’ Those lines are all from one stanza, and they do nothing for my ear—they do not flow well, create a concrete image in my head, or stir any kind of emotion in my gut. They read almost as a fluffy ‘self-help’ guide created by a financial company that employed a writer to spice up their instruction manuals or life guidance articles. The language and writing is not ‘poetical,’ but instead the kind of poetry you see in many undergraduate creative writing courses—poems that are made up of sentences that are smashed together haphazardly, the words clunky and the flow and transitions between the lines non-existent.
The second section, titled ‘Pellegrinaggio,’ falls victim to many of the same flaws. Consisting of fourteen individual poems, the section as a whole reads as one long travel journal of a trip that Kingsolver took to Italy with family members young and old, a trip that seems to be half pleasure and half discovery for her husband’s mother, a woman who was born and raised in Italy. While she should have a goldmine of ideas and subjects to write poems about, the poems themselves read like actual sentences pulled straight from a journal, as if Kingsolver wrote little observations at the beginning or end of their days, and then jumbled them together, awkwardly adding little transitional words at the end of some lines to make them flow in a better way than simply plopping them down on the page in large squares of text.
Everything is not bad in this collection though—the third section, one that deals mainly with grief and loss, has one of my favorite poems of the entire collection: ‘My Mother’s Last Forty Minutes.’ The poem seems simple on its surface: it’s a recounting of Kingsolver’s mother’s last few minutes on Earth, a retelling of the scene and of the emotions that she was feeling as she watched her mother physically die, but there’s more to it than that. The poem, stretching over four pages, becomes a meditation on how one can mourn a family member whom you don’t truly love unconditionally, and how to deal with the loss of a family member who acted in an abusive manner towards you. Kingsolver makes overt hints that her relationship with her mother was horribly strained and in that abusive category, yet she struggles internally because she does feel something like sadness about her mother passing. Readers watch as Kingsolver goes through this inner turmoil, this fighting with herself, to figure out why she feels the way she does, and it’s a beautiful—and dense—poem that is a testament to Kingsolver’s narrative prowess.
But, unlike her beautifully written fiction, her poems are not well-suited places for her dense writing skills, and the most glaring example of this comes from a poem in the sixth section, titled ‘Where It Begins.’ This poem, which is more like an actual essay, in both form and style and punctuation, is a reflection of important moments throughout Kingsolver’s life, many of them seemingly insignificant at the time (laying in a field in the middle of a summer when young, hanging out with friends after school, falling in love for the first time at a young age, etc.), but the lines don’t actually reflect on anything. They remind me of an assignment given to a class by a high school English teacher, one where the directions say to ‘think of an important memory from when you were younger, and make the sentences sound like the poetry we've been studying this unit.’ She writes these descriptive sentences of what the physical world around her looks and feels like, but they don’t do anything in the sense that lines of poetry should. Simply reciting what the tree you’re laying under looks like, or what the wind feels like as it lifts your hair, or what color the wheat is that day, isn’t poetry. That’s just a bunch of random observations strung together in crowded paragraph blocks for six long pages, and then called poetry simply because you can call it a poem.
The fifth section also has some poems that are personal favorites of mine (‘Thief,’ which deals with the idea of how writers borrow and steal from each other to create their own works, and ‘Insomniac Villanelle,’ a recounting of famous insomniac-ridden authors and Kingsolver’s comment on the concept of insomnia), but there are not enough interesting or well-written poems in that section or the others in the collection to warrant a satisfactory feeling after reading them all.
The poems, quite simply, just don’t do anything for me. Like ‘Where It Begins,’ many of the poems in this collection read not as deep reflections on the mysteries and themes of life, but as clunkily written lines that are hollowly placed together to create a physical poem, with none of the technical or emotional aspects of an actual poem. Kingsolver is a phenomenal writer of fiction, but I unfortunately think that's the only reason this collection was published--her clout from one literary world extended to another, and it produced a collection that is neither remarkable nor worth more than a cursory reading.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Where to Find It: Library Catalog, Amazon, Boswell Books
Favorite Poem: ‘Thief’
I read Dickens by dim lamplight
casing the joint for plots. This
will not be a holdup, no clearing
out whole cash drawers into my bag--
just a shoplifter's itch: I'll take
the convict benefactor, the woman
who knits rebellions, into my pockets.
Woolf, I read in my room
behind a locked door where she
commands me to empty out everything
like airport security: Nothing!
Walk naked through the passage,
but quick as life I swipe her
badge, make off with her authority.
Emerson, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, H.D.
I read with my face
planted, belly to earth,
leavings of the infinite
composting in my rib cage
sun and rain on my back
bringing up a pelt of new grass.
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