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What Came Before
This collection of poems reveals, gently, how to live and love -- how to let things "unfold" even when great pain or longing is involved.
104 pages, Perfect Paperback
First published September 18, 2007
About the author
Irene Latham
40 books165 followersIrene Latham is a poet and novelist who was born the middle child and first daughter of five kids.
Irene has lived all sorts of places and traveled worldwide. Since 1984 she has called Alabama home.
She thinks growing up with three brothers was great preparation for raising her three sons. She also thinks getting a sister was one of the best things that has ever happened to her.
Irene is proud to be the only leftie in her family of origin AND in her current family.
According to Irene's Dr. Seuss' MY BOOK ABOUT ME, she has wanted to be writer since she was eight years old.
She also wanted to train a horse that her sister would ride to victory in the Kentucky Derby. That hasn't happened. Yet.
Irene didn't take a single writing course in college.
Irene has lived all sorts of places and traveled worldwide. Since 1984 she has called Alabama home.
She thinks growing up with three brothers was great preparation for raising her three sons. She also thinks getting a sister was one of the best things that has ever happened to her.
Irene is proud to be the only leftie in her family of origin AND in her current family.
According to Irene's Dr. Seuss' MY BOOK ABOUT ME, she has wanted to be writer since she was eight years old.
She also wanted to train a horse that her sister would ride to victory in the Kentucky Derby. That hasn't happened. Yet.
Irene didn't take a single writing course in college.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 7, 2012
I hate to call anyone a regional poet because it makes them sound so limited. But I do want to mention that Irene Latham is from Alabama (where I live), which is probably why I came across this book of poetry, copyrighted 2007 from Negative Capability Press. She was the Alabama State Poetry Society's Poet of the Year in 2006.
I was neither wowed by this book nor disappointed in it. I really liked her sensual poems at the beginning of the book, then grew tired of the continued theme. She went on to more domestic subject matter and I realized at the end that her most powerful work was that dealing with the pull toward physical passion and union at the beginning. Overall, her subject matter stayed very close to home. It appears to be arranged in adult chronology: desire/love/romance, children/nesting, divorce, aging. I seem to be running into a lot of books with that sequence lately. In this case, the poems aren't always first person so that aging involves a poem about an aging parent, grandmother, etc.
I would read another of her books to see what more she has to say about life but I wouldn't expect a lot of flash. Below I quote in full the opening poem:
Mississippi Flyway
First things first, you said
then closed the blinds.
Light scissored through anyway,
cut across the bed,
painted tiger stripes on your skin.
Disoriented, blind
to all but instinct, I was
a bird pushing forward
along an unfamiliar flyway,
unprepared for the towering
garden of illuminated glass and granite
rising unbidden as memory.
In Chicago the Sears Tower
voluntarily turns down its lights
during migration season
to cut down on the deaths.
But there in that room
your eyes blazed.
It would have been a difficult poem to quote in part because it all comes together in that last line. I enjoy the unexpected comparisons here and the power of that last line.
Another poem I enjoyed that was not about sensuality was "How to Untie a Knot." It also has something of an unexpected quality, a turn. It begins with a child instructed by her father about how to tie her shoes and ends with this about her parents:
But after twenty-two years, the knot
would not loosen.
The fibers, rubbed raw
now sank into each other,
the way colors bleed
and become just another color.
It was my mother who finally
pulled out the scissors, mouth open in a vulgar smile.
The knot, still intact,
she tossed into the trash.
The shoe, she gave away.
Irene Latham knows her way around a poem and I would not shy away from another volume of her work but I'm also not going to actively seek one out.
I was neither wowed by this book nor disappointed in it. I really liked her sensual poems at the beginning of the book, then grew tired of the continued theme. She went on to more domestic subject matter and I realized at the end that her most powerful work was that dealing with the pull toward physical passion and union at the beginning. Overall, her subject matter stayed very close to home. It appears to be arranged in adult chronology: desire/love/romance, children/nesting, divorce, aging. I seem to be running into a lot of books with that sequence lately. In this case, the poems aren't always first person so that aging involves a poem about an aging parent, grandmother, etc.
I would read another of her books to see what more she has to say about life but I wouldn't expect a lot of flash. Below I quote in full the opening poem:
Mississippi Flyway
First things first, you said
then closed the blinds.
Light scissored through anyway,
cut across the bed,
painted tiger stripes on your skin.
Disoriented, blind
to all but instinct, I was
a bird pushing forward
along an unfamiliar flyway,
unprepared for the towering
garden of illuminated glass and granite
rising unbidden as memory.
In Chicago the Sears Tower
voluntarily turns down its lights
during migration season
to cut down on the deaths.
But there in that room
your eyes blazed.
It would have been a difficult poem to quote in part because it all comes together in that last line. I enjoy the unexpected comparisons here and the power of that last line.
Another poem I enjoyed that was not about sensuality was "How to Untie a Knot." It also has something of an unexpected quality, a turn. It begins with a child instructed by her father about how to tie her shoes and ends with this about her parents:
But after twenty-two years, the knot
would not loosen.
The fibers, rubbed raw
now sank into each other,
the way colors bleed
and become just another color.
It was my mother who finally
pulled out the scissors, mouth open in a vulgar smile.
The knot, still intact,
she tossed into the trash.
The shoe, she gave away.
Irene Latham knows her way around a poem and I would not shy away from another volume of her work but I'm also not going to actively seek one out.
Displaying 1 of 1 review