A Review of Seeking Center, A Collection of Poems by Joan Gelfand, 71 pp., Two Bridges Press, 2006.

In Seeking Center, Joan Gelfand joins the reader in a free-wheeling discussion, beyond the poems themselves, regarding what is poetry today, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In forms that span from the short, highly-constrained haiku to the almost limitless prose poem, she seems to define poems as she produces them. She refines this discussion through poetic techniques that include innovative line breaks, a few rhymes and near-rhymes, internal rhymes that surprise and wordplay. Through all of this she seems to ask-and-answer what is poetry? And isn’t poetry being constantly redefined by new voice, new angles, and vision. What is a Joan Gelfand poem?

These poems reach widely into media other than the printed word, thus knitting a web of connections between arts and artists. “Museum Pieces,” the first of four sections, deals almost exclusively with reactions to visual art. At her best, Gelfand expresses the ability of a work of art to shock our prosaic universe. In the opening poem she begins:

Across the dirty street from “Heavenly Body:
Quality Collision Repair and Refinishing,”
A feather-light whale
Floats.

By grounding the reader in the dirty streets, Gelfand juxtaposes ‘’art” that ethereal, non-linear, always moving target. She uses a similar technique in “Monet,” but instead of using third person she employs a strong authorial presence:

How many times have I seen you
And not seen you?
Today, your subtle colors whisper —
Not the gardens, not the water lilies —

Perhaps the most ambitious section is “Music/Dream Series,” in which the poems are numbered to connect them not only to various musical pieces but to the other poems in a sequence. I was particularly moved by the second, third, and fourth stanzas of “Even If”:

That chord wraps its music around your heart
That cord is cut
(The one that connected you
pulled you embraced you with its sweet and sad notes.)
That first sorrow.

This, where she employs her full poetic arsenal, including wordplay and enjambment, to build bridges between the arts, shows Gelfand at her strongest.

The ‘you’ in the poems of this volume is amorphous; it seems she uses second person to describe, rather than one particular person, the ‘other.’ If a reader tries to connect all the dots between all the referents of ‘you’, frustration could set in, but once a reader understands Gelfand’s conceit, the poems grow in their ability to show how the ‘you’ shifts with the time, place, and mood of the poetic voice.
Where she continues with this kind of word play, as in “Music: Dream Twelve,” which is subtitled Love in the Wrong Key, in which she sets a musical term against it’s non-musical counterpoint, these poems continue to work well.

The short section, Heritage, is perhaps her strongest. It contains a moving tribute to a father, named ‘Daddy-O.” The third stanza subtitled “III. All Around the Town” (after the “I. Uptown” and “II. Downtown”) starts:

Daddy-O the FDR still stinks; the traffic would drive you mad,
And all your friends are dead.
But the days still grow dusky, and in that space between day and night

Romance and expectation loiter, inspired by Cannonball Adderly, evokes a mythical place, of New York, of a father who’s passed on, of the mystery of one of the world’s most textured urban environments.

“Seeking Center” ends with a marvelous poem called “Burial.” Listing a litany of prosaic burial scenes right until the final stanza, where the poem turns and she opens our hearts with:

My burial was none of these.
An angel chanted.
And I went under, alone and
Unafraid.

What a fine way to end a book of poems!

Kevin Arnold lives in Portola Valley, where he rides horses. He’s President of Poetry Center San Jose and the director of this year’s Gold Rush Writer’s Retreat.