light lowering in diminished sevenths
By Judy Kronenfeld.
(Beacon Falls, CT. The Litchfield Review Press.)
100 pages. Paperback: $19.99, ISBN # 978-1606433362.
Reviewed by Brent Fisk
I once read a bit of advice from an editor that admonished writers, “Nobody wants to read about your relatives but you.” And, having published several chapbooks and in many journals, Judy Kronenfeld is the kind of writer that knows just where to tell certain editors to stick such silly advice.
In her collection, light lowering in diminished sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize, Judy Kronenfeld gives us a loose collection of familial memories. I say “familial” in the largest sense, as not every poem is about blood kin, but most, and the best, are about our larger, extended family, including the fuzzy dead that haunt our lives and give us the rich phrasing we hear in dreams. I say “loose” because the narrative thread that ties these poems together has the disarticulated and disjointed sense of logic found in dreams and the stories that small children collect for retelling around the dinner table. These are poems about living with death, about how the dead survive, about how the dead come back to us.
Poets collect a startling number of fragmentary details that bother them until they plant them in their poems like seeds. In “Visiting Hour,” we have a final image of a wheelchair knocking “against the dock of her bed” and a poem later, in “Maiden Voyages” her “daughter come and gone/ in the old swaying/ boat of a car” after seeing the increasingly frail body of her grandmother. Still later we have “Tonight, the dead/ whose names are water/ in water…” and you begin to see the fluidity of images rising like a river that has spilled its banks. Houses come unmoored along with lives.
And knowledge, even what seem the most useless bits of family lore, is the one thing that tethers us to those we most love. light lowering in diminished sevenths is a fine book, and one I’d particularly recommend to anyone struggling with the death or illness of a loved one.
Brent Fisk is a graduate student in English at Western Kentucky University, where he works as a librarian. He has published over 200 poems in literary journals such as Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, and The Southeast Review.