These Days of Simple Mooring: New and Selected Poems —by Florence Weinberger
Publisher: Blue Light Press
July 27, 2022
Paperback: 122 pages
ISBN-10: 1421835231
ISBN-13:978-1421835235
5 Stars
Poetry should be read aloud, each syllable should be felt in the mouth, savored, sent forth on your breath with its siblings. This book is no exception.
I had the opportunity, through the magic of Zoom, to see Ms. Weinberger read from her new book. Within a few days, I had my own copy, I am so glad I both saw/heard her, and now can see/hear her again and again.
As you can see from the photo, I have it heavy and colorfully marked, poems and lines I will return to again and again. From the first poem, “What We Did Sundays During the War” to the last, “Announcement” we are given a memoir, a history lesson, words of beauty. Usually, when I read a collection like this, I find a few poems that take my breath away with their beauty, most of the poem are very good, and there are a few I wonder why they were included. I did not have that happen with this book. There were several that took my breath away, and all the rest were marvelous.
“What We Did Sundays During the War” begins: ‘In the early forties, few people owned a car, and if you had one, / you hardly used it, because gas was rationed.’ Weinberger goes on to tell us how they visited her father’s nephew, Benny. Benny was a doctor, and she stayed in the waiting room and read magazines she never ‘saw anywhere else, like Esquire.’
There are five parts to this collection—the first, and longest is These Days of Simple Mooring, The Invisible Telling Its Shape, Breathing Like a Jew, Sacred Graffiti, and Ghost Tattoo.
The Invisible Telling Its Shape begins with ‘I’m Not Playing Around. A short 7-line poem of a girl who gave as good as she got. She made herself visible and, I dare say, held her own with the school yard bullies.
Breathing Like a Jew starts off with, “From Where the Feet Grow.” ‘Curious how Yiddish won’t translate easily / into American idiom so I can share with you / the graze of my father’s judgment, /’
“Survivor” tells ‘the depths of smokestacks, down ‘to the bone-bottom ground’ It ends, “This year, he will show his daughters / where he was born. He will show them /the chimney, the iron gate, / the deep oven where his mother baked bread.’ Between that poem and the next, “He Wears Old Socks which contains the lines, ‘It’s the way he / represents the dead’ I had to pause, to swallow the ash, to remember.
Another very short poem, from Sacred Graffiti, “From a Penitent’s Hand” ‘There is a plant called crown of thorns, / leafless, spiky, clotted with red / flowers. // Once it grew outside my house. Now / it lives inside my head, scratching, scratching / to get out.’
I truly enjoyed the differences in her poems not just of subject matter, but style. Prose poems to structured poems, to narrative. The length also varies, so the reader doesn’t get bored by the sameness—there is no sameness, except in the depth and breadth of the collection.
The last poem, “Announcement” neatly closes the book with these four lines. ‘A grandchild reads Tarot cards, but won’t do mine. / They know my life’s not found in the flip, //not in the Death or the Priestess cards, but somewhere / in the cloud, written out in longhand, and still unlived.’
Reading this book takes you on trips to the other side of the world. Gives you entrée into the lives of people that I, for one, wish I could know. This is a perfect book to read at night, before turning out the light. Read one or two, out loud, feel the words, send them into your room and from there into the world.
