Review of a First Book of Poems

Red Hen’s Daughters by Patricia Jean Lapidus

ISBN 978-1442172920 Amazon $12 http://www.tinyurl.com/pj33ns

by Rob Carr

…They say your father

killed her while she worked.

Their story has no room

for your innocence at supper.  Listen.

We listen.

We hear the sounds of life around the Androscoggin and Kennebec rivers by the Maine farm where the poet grew up.  Through this fine collection of poems we hear – and see — far more than we often do in a poet’s first volume of work.

We understand the “tough divinity” of life which the poet discovers in Sal, the local beggar woman.  We listen to the lean syllabic lines and crisp diction of Lapidus’ poems, like these from “The Competitor:”

Ready.

Will the owl come now?  Meddy wants to know.

Nope.  Owls hunt at night.

Truth comes in simple forms.  In this remarkable poem the narrator learns that “to remember the owl is to tell two stories.”  The owl and the father are linked by the necessity of the natural, just as they are adroitly linked in the poem by the parallel rhythmic lines of “ka-chop, close, lift and spill” and “swoop, snap, up and away.”

Reading these poems we accumulate the discoveries the poet has made about life.  In “Poems for Buttercup,” for instance, during a moment of competitive jealousy over the attention paid by her husband to their cow the narrator’s mother throws a whisk broom at him.  He retreats, diplomatically. “not so much as slamming the kitchen door on his way out.”

…he’s glad he knows the calm moves

needed to handle a nervous milker, a flighty flock.

Lapidus traces back in poems such as “The Village” the competition that has been the fabric of our life since the Goth invasions.  Yet in this volume there is humor: “In my next life I will be a skunk,” from “In the Lap of the Forest.”  There is whimsy: shopping for a fan during autumn in “Cooling Value.”  There is, in “Commentary,” light self-deprecation:

some of us have lots to say

about our stay

on earth.

The poet shows us that behind the tough, competitive, even violent yin and yang of the natural world, we too can participate in an aspect of divinity.  In “Thumb on a Yellow Comb at Ben Franklin’s Five and Dime Before Combs Come in Yellow” – a great title — the poet, her aunt, her mother, and her aged grandpa all end up of one mind through the creative magic of the dreams of the narrator.

From “Napping Under the Bird Clock:”

Evidence to the boy that birds

could think and plan – or that that something

bigger, call it the great wild other,

articulated through birds the way a wind

patterns grasses, tall before they fall

to the mower.

Poetry is, of course, the telling of stories, the creating of fictions, magic dreams and divine patterns in our minds.  As we read these skilled poems, we rise above the natural order of life and begin, as Lapidus says in Cows, “lapping astral pastures.”

There is much in this first book of Lapidus’ poetry to listen to, and much pleasure in listening to it.

- Rob Carr

Rob Carr is a writer, editor and ghostwriter whose projects include a dozen books, both fiction and non fiction, as well as business plans, web sites, advertising and marketing material, technical writing and even a couple poems of his own.  He also has taught college English, Literature and Creative Writing.  Rob lives in the hills of Connecticut with his wife and two children.

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