Katy Lederer's The Heaven-Sent Leaf

I'll probably talk more about this book later, as I've just begun enjoying it.

This came out recently (2008) through BOA Editions, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

I don't know if it won any awards, but it should have.

Lederer is one of my favorite contemporary poets.

It's so hard to find poetry invested more in the soul and the planet than it is in style or pelf of one sort or another.

This book is that blessed exception.

Here's a poem.

It has that Szymborska smack of the metaphysical.

But rife with negative capability.

Is it the poem she's describing? Art itself? Self? The Other?

Certainly the paronomasia around the various uses of the word pen strongly suggests the phenomenology of writing and the attendant potential for falsity of embodiment.

But it applies to all of these things. And more.



      An Animal


Black, derogatory.
How. How. How.
And why.
A feeling. Pen it in.
To form it, to make it a subject, a nugget,
To pen the monstrosity in.
To take a metaphor from daily life of what none of us knows.
To make a shape of it, imagine it,
To make of it
A thing.
To want very badly to pen the thing in,
Make it stay,
Like an animal, howling.



And then there's this memorable aubade of a (troublous) love poem...in which we are told somewhat archly, "This setting is love..."

Containment and temperature.

The poet captures the vexing indices well here.



      Morning Song


You color all. Is this longing?
Or private.
Is it private to speak in the morning,
The birdsong like knives?
We sit on this bench while this wind swirls and billows.
This setting is love, yet we sit on this bench, yet we listen to
    birdsong.
This color, your brain, which is bluer than water.
I touch it, your brain, which is cooler than water.
I wonder, your brain, when it falters, will it be so cold?
We buffet one another with our bodies, with our slackened
Hearts. I put myself in it, your body, which aches.
I put myself in it, your brain,
Which is cooler than water.