STARTLEMENT: New and Selected Poems, by Ada Limón
Ada Limón’s “Startlement: New and Selected Poems” arrives bearing nearly every blue ribbon the American poetry world can bestow. Limón, who is 49, just ended two terms as the United States poet laureate; she’s one of only 17 writers in the past 25 years to get a MacArthur “genius grant” for poetry; she’s won the National Book Critics Circle Award and been a finalist for the National Book Award; and she’s taken home a Guggenheim fellowship for good measure.
Despite all of this, she’s a very fine poet.
Charm and competence matter in life, but they matter even more in poetry. As the art form has dwindled as a cultural force, its institutions have increasingly elevated writers not simply because they’re skilled, but also because they’re seen as reliable, tactful ambassadors to the broader universe. This obviously beats having the art form represented by misanthropes and crackpots, but it does convey certain advantages upon friendly, solid, media-savvy poets who are always so happy to see you because oh my gosh it’s been ages you look amazing and your last book was incredible I’m so excited for our panel.
Limón is adept at this brand of diplomacy, but her work is strong enough not to need it. Her six collections get roughly 25 pages apiece here, with another 35 going to new poems. In a world of brick-size selected volumes, it’s nice to see such thrift (the book is also lovely, which is a tribute to her longtime publisher, Milkweed Editions).
Limón’s characteristic voice is casual, even chatty (“The big-ass bees are back”) and warmly personal (you’ll learn that Limón was a child of divorce, that she had to come to terms with infertility, that she struggled with a spine malformation). While the work here is gratifyingly varied in its structures, including a rhymed sonnet sequence, the dominant mode is free verse meditation, usually anchored by something the poet is observing (“I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party!”), rather than by, say, a philosophical puzzle.
Limón’s best work displays, to borrow a line from the Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, “a kind of flying-heartedness” — it’s garrulous, funny and heart-on-sleeve even when being a little wicked. In “I Remember the Carrots,” Limón tells us she hasn’t “given up on trying to live a good life” and imagines “how agreeable I’ll be.” Then she pivots:
When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots,
their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot.
And so I ripped them all out. I broke the new roots
and carried them, like a prize, to my father
who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop.
I loved them: my own bright dead things.
I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.
Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented
the contentment of the field. Why must we practice
this surrender? What I mean is: there are days
I still want to kill the carrots because I can.
The aggressively colloquial presentation allows Limón to set some much pricklier ideas in play — that we might seek to “live a good life” by being “agreeable,” “nice” even, but that we instinctively push against the very constraints that make such a life possible. The revelation at the end feels appropriate, and the nicely judged consonance (“kill,” “carrots,” “can”) underscores it.
Limón’s attentiveness to readers is a considerable strength; it can also be a weakness. Her writing sometimes seems eager not simply to speak to her audience, but to actively court it, and in particular to court it with sentimental payoffs that the poems may hustle to reach. For example, “Salvage” centers on a tree that is half-dead; it ends:
… I place my hand on the unscarred
bark that is cool and unsullied, and because I cannot
apologize to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.
In its haste to deliver that final, dramatic line, the poem muddles the speaker’s personhood (the “I” that is speaking “to my own self” weirdly assigns a different life — “your life” — to its addressee), while also including redundant descriptions (bark that is “unscarred” is also presumably “unsullied”), both of which seem plucked from the Handbook of Poetic Adjectives.
But if Limón’s writing can at times lead her audience by the hand, at least it provides steady, capable guidance. “Give Me This” focuses on a groundhog who steals the poet’s tomatoes, becoming both nemesis and proxy for the author, who is also sustained by simple pleasures, earthly delights. “She is a funny creature and earnest,” writes Limón, “and she is doing what she can to survive.” That the groundhog’s food comes from her unseen human observer suggests that when it comes to survival, the question isn’t simply what we do, but also what others — poets, even — have done for us, often without our knowing, because they wanted to add something interesting to the world.
STARTLEMENT: New and Selected Poems | By Ada Limón | Milkweed Editions | 203 pp. | $28
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