Two Yvonnes: Poems

Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets

by Jessica Greenbaum

This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the "New Yorker." Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday. Written in "plain American that cats and dogs can read," as Marianne Moore phrased it, these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wisława Szymborska, the reportage of Yehuda Amichai, and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker. The book asks at heart: how does life present itself to us, and how do we create value from our delights and losses? Riding on Kenneth Koch's instruction to "find one true feeling and hang on," "The Two Yvonnes" overtakes the present with candor, meditation, and the classic aspiration to shape lyric into a lasting force.

Moving from 1960s Long Island, to 1980s Houston, to today's Brooklyn, the poems range in subject from the pages of the Talmud to a squirrel trapped in a kitchen. One tells the story of young lovers "warmed by the rays / Their pelvic bones sent over the horizon of their belts," while another describes the Bronx Zoo in winter, where the giraffes pad about "like nurses walking quietly / outside a sick room." Another poem defines the speaker via a "packing slip" of her parts--"brown eyes, brown hair, from hirsute tribes in Poland and Russia." The title poem, in which the speaker and friends stumble through a series of flawed memories about each other, unearths the human vulnerabilities that shape so much of the collection.______

From "The Two Yvonnes" WHEN MY DAUGHTER GOT SICK"Jessica Greenbaum"

Her cries impersonated all the world;The fountain's bubbling speech was just a trickBut still I turned and looked, as she implored, Or leaned toward muffled noises through the bricks: Just radio, whose waves might be her wav-ering, whose pitch might be her quavering, I turned toward, where, the sirens might be "Save

Me," "Help me," "Mommy, Mommy"--everythingShe, too, had said, since sloughing off the world.She took to bed, and now her voice stays fusedTo air like outlines of a bygone girl;The streets, the lake, the room--just places bruisedWithout her form, the way your sheets still holdRough echoes of the risen sleeper, cold.

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, ebook

First published October 1, 2012

About the author

Jessica Greenbaum is an American poet. Her first book, Inventing Difficulty (1998), won the Gerald Cable Prize. Her second book, The Two Yvonnes (2012), was chosen by Paul Muldoon for Princeton’s Series of Contemporary Poets. She is the poetry editor for upstreet and lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her second collection, which was released more than a decade after her first, Jessica Greenbaum's New York city plain speech narrative poetry re-emerges. Greenbaum's gift is how transparent her poetry is without feeling gimmicky, there is no arcane trickery of poems here. But she lets the ambiguity of her narrative topics become the space for negative capacity. Greenbaum's concerns are aging in the city--a young poet who is no longer all that young and thus so are the collections concerns: a sick child, a marriage that is loving but slightly overripe, an ambulance around declining faith, etc. Nothing stunning original here, but Greenbaum is a deft enough poem that they don't feel tired or cliche either. Greenbaum gives her accessible poetry diversity by including some subtle formal verse in with her narrative free-verse. A strong second collection and one understands why Paul Muldoon selected it for the rebirth of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

from Next Door: "That silence / is also like the space between the reader and the page, / the little nation between the writer's words"

from What We Read Then: "But by the time the truth snaked through the interference / the books sat solidly in our minds like cross-legged girls / in circles around a campfire"

from Before: "The blueberries outnumbered the leaves around the lake, full / blown like balloons tied off at the stem. You could trip them / a handful at a time from the stems, but even so it required much / repositioning of the canoe, and wading, and many landings / to collect enough for a pie, and because we had pancakes, / muffins and sauces, I hoped my girls might feel surrounded / by more of something wonderful than they could use."

[Haley Direnzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book of poetry. I read it slowly, which I rarely do with short works like this. Loved how it focused on the moments in our day to day. A lot to reflect on here, beautiful language and metaphors.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this slightly less than her first collection, which was still enough to enjoy reading it -- it hasn't left any strong memories, though, except a vague sense that her children might not enjoy being memorialised in published poetry. (But then again, perhaps they don't mind at all.)