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Brian Teare’s poetry collection Companion Grasses is a beautiful book full of sounds, gorgeous images, and thought-provoking ideas. It was not a book that I started reading and immediately fell into, Teare’s poems take some work. I read the first few and felt like I was outside looking at them through a window, or since much of the book centers around nature, I was inside looking out and couldn’t turn the door knob. I set the book aside for a week or so and tried again.
There is something to be said for doing this because the poems were doing work I wasn’t even aware of. When I began again from the beginning, they rushed right up to meet me. This is not to say it was smooth and easy sailing the rest of the way, only that I found a way to read the poems.
The book is broken up into three sections with the largest one belonging to section two and containing a long series of poems, separate but related, under the broad heading of “Transcendental Grammar Crown.” It is a wonderful series in which a phrase or idea from one poem is taken up in the next and so on and so on.
It goes like this. The first poem in the series is called “The Leap From Matter (Idealism)” and the last stanza (I am not going to be able to reproduce the spacing properly) is this:
—which is
to say to be our body is sticky hurt fir white-green lichen the fawn’s
brown sides shot through with spots like pastured asters we walk in
skin & salamanders exactly the orange of old pine &still we love
our minds do seem clearer the way quartz tricks a window into earth
The next poem is called “Our Minds Do Seem (Rain Guide)” and here is part of it:
— wanting nothing for a sentence to make
noise sense we went earward to wear
appearance a noun a page a field
guided to wildflowers —is lips is hoodedis ends in spikes purple
paired leaves a square
stem : hello hairy skullcap
“We went earward,” I love that! And I like how “to wear appearance” is not what I would expect; it makes a delightful surprise and catches up my brain and thoughts and turns them just a little to see things differently.
The next poem is called “Hello (Ives).” See how he works it? Throughout this series are beautiful phrases like “the smell/of hay sweeter than seeing” and “afternoon encumbered by thunder” and “solstice brings the field/ to its knees.”
A good many of the poems take place during a walk or are initiated by a walk and full of the sound of wind in the trees, the rustling of grasses, and the waves of the ocean. What Teare seems to be searching for is a language, a grammar, that transcends the facts of things, that transcends our humanness, that allows us to open outwards and step across the boundary we created to separate ourselves from the rest of the natural world.
I was making language
a stem to aspire to :
He is well aware “the poem can’t hold the real/ fields, of course,” but he also insists
matter a mere shift
in limits, even skin’sa trick of the liminal :
touch here & I giveway to elsewhere :
Teare is currently an assistant professor of English at Temple University. He has won several fellowships and awards including the Lambda Award for his collection Pleasure. I don’t know what his other collections are like, but Companion Grasses is rich and heady, full of sound and the scent of earth and moments that make me stop and think. They are not easy poems and I by no means figured them all out. I can say though that I found them worth the effort and I hope to read some of Teare’s other collections sometime.
I do that with volumes of poetry sometimes, set them aside to try later, but I’ve never tried only a week later. Sounds like it’s worth doing, or at least it was in this case.
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Jeanne, sometimes I just give it a couple of days before trying again. But if the second attempt hadn’t gone well this time I probably would have set the book aside for a couple weeks before trying again.
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Thank you for introducing me to a new (to me) poet. I love to hear about the process of reading poetry.
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Gubbinal, you bet! Teare is new to me too so he was a nice discovery.
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You have been reading and quoting some awesome stuff lately!! I love this part “a trick of the liminal :
touch here & I give
way to elsewhere”
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cirtnecce, I’m in a happy reading place right now 🙂 I love that line too. I had never heard of Teare before reading this book so I am really happy that he turned out to be so good and so interesting!
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Haha Stefanie, when I saw the post title in my in-box, I thought this was going to be a gardening post! And then I see it is poetry with a music themed cover. You’re playing with my mind.
I know he’s not the same, but there’s a ring of Gerard Manley Hopkins to the sound of his poetry, and when you say that you think he is searching for “a language, a grammar, that transcends the facts of things” that sounds like GMH too. I can see though why you had to come back to the poetry. It flows nicely but is not immediately accessible.
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Fooled you whisperinggums! Have to keep you on your toes 😀
I really have to get around to reading GMH one of these days. Maybe he will be a goal for 2017. Heh, yeah, the poems all flow nicely and sound beautiful but then I’d get to the end and have no idea what it all said or means! I had to to a lot of rereading, but then good poetry encourages rereading not just because it might be difficult.
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You did and you do. Will keep my Alzheimers at bay! And yes you’re right about good poetry. It’s went I always love to go back to posts like Eliot and Hopkins for a start.
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Like cirtnecce above I love that line ‘a trick of the liminal’. Thanks for introducing me to a poet I hadn’t heard of.
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Vicky, it’s a wonderful line that i like very much too! Teare was new to me as well. I like making “new” poet discoveries 🙂
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So far I have been reading your poem every day since it arrived and only this morning, again reading it aloud it found a rhythm all by itself.
I immensely enjoyed that even without understanding my reading. Next step is of course to understand what I am reading. That may take a few more days I think.
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Cath, yay! Take your time, it will all come together 🙂
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Oh, this sounds really lovely. I like the idea of the musicality of it and even the idea of the way the words are spaced out on the page reminds me of the pattering of rain on the concrete or into a puddle. Maybe one to check out from the library. Is it too challenging for a person who is ‘not a very good’ poetry reader?
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Danielle, I like that image of the word spacing being like rain! It kind of is and I didn’t even notice it! It’s challenging but not impossible. If it seems interesting, give it try, you’ve got nothing to lose!
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