BRATTLEBORO — “Voices Like Wind Chimes,” by Arlene F. Distler (Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Ky., 2014) is a remarkable new chapbook contains 21 of Distler's finely limned poems. To read through from beginning to end is to travel the transforming milestones of a rich and fascinating life.
This poet finds wisdom and joy in nature, from the smallest found object to the changing sky. The reader is surprised and overjoyed by so much illumination, so much restraint, often through understatement that carries tremendous weight of meaning.
Always grounded in bodily being, the work of this poet “grafting . . .image to thought,” leaves no doubt that image is primary, thought follows - that poems are born this way for a poet who is also an accomplished painter.
A rich inner life is honored throughout, whether the poem's subject is women voting for the first time in Afghanistan, family misadventures, or a Monarch butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.
The chapbook begins with “Centering,” which introduces us to the poet's joy of finding multiple meanings in a single word - many of the poems are playful in this way - starting out with one meaning, then opening up new dimensions, until our minds are stunned into presence by myriad mind-bending possibilities of meaning.
“Centering” anchors the book at its beginning, the way the final poem (“Chrysalis,” about silence and contemplation) anchors the book's ending: it is about physical strength and frailty, quiet grace, creativity, poignant connection in the face of inevitable loss. The loss is faced for what it is, delicately, with joyous gratitude in the moment, from an inner center of certainty and love.
We meet the artist again in “Duck Harbor,” where she takes us into the very particular work of seeing and drawing “colors and shapes,” the painter herself centered in “ten square feet” for hours, blissful, missing nothing: the clouds, the greed of lovers and of rapacious birds; and how all of it changes with passing time.
“I draw the seagulls strutting
as they caw their shrill cry,
draw their sharp curved beaks, perfect
for breaking shells, extracting meat.”
We time-travel in “Baghdad-on-the-Bay” to meet the child who at age 12 observed and remembered the sights and smells of a briny pier, of fishermen, of shrimp used for bait, 'little barbarisms,' all brought into a new realization through the parable of a Taoist text:
“if the true nature of all
could be known, we would see
the rabbit in the wolf's maw
gives up its life to the wolf's appetite
in an act of love not visible with ordinary eyes.”
“Vermont Existential” is a powerful poem about a heartfelt but grueling homesteading venture that ultimately ended. The image of the old farmhouse as a “ghost ship” brings back memories of the isolation and unending chores of a abandoned way of life, where “More often that not the water froze,/potatoes disappeared into the bellies of mice,/the foundation wept.”
“Years later, on a return visit,
there's only a burnt and bruised hull,
yellow jackets in the cellar hole,
chimney the only thing standing,
the sky, as usual
brooding and hallowed.”
In “The Photograph,” we are reminded that the way one grows up may be vastly different from the adult life one chooses. A young girl in a “pink satin gown” is at her debutante party, with her mind elsewhere: “All I remember of the night/is my beaded clutch bag/and the lure of Latin romance.” The picture in her parents' home years later reveals her in “Vermont woolens,” in contrast to her sisters' 'vamping' and 'thick eye make-up.'
The poem pokes sly fun at psychological interpretations ('cornered/by Rorschach-blot wallpaper') while it evokes a whole era of what was expected of pubescent girls.
Those sisters appear again in a poem entitled “Sisters – a love poem,” which follows the complexities of a family through lived decades of estrangement and reconciliation.
“To Begin Again” and “After a Long Winter,” bring themes of renewal after great hardship; the first goes from grief to longing again; the latter could be an emblem for rebirth of the spirit following any winter's siege:
“it will take a while
to catch up
to all this
trembling life.”
As it is impossible to describe what any true poem is “about,” this collection, chock-full of gems, defies easy description. One wants to say to the Reader: take it up, read it, experience each poem for what it is. Many of them are deeply intimate; reading them opens the heart – to be in the presence of so much vulnerability, and sense the courage it takes to show it to the world.