With Mouths Open Wide: New and Selected Poems

by John Caddy

“Full of spondaic gravity and grit.” —BRUCE BOND Showcasing the fortitude and wisdom, the honey and fire, the jab and embrace of a master poet, With Mouths Open Wide is a landmark collection of more than three decades of writing. Including work from John Caddy’s previous five books as well as new poems drawn from his experiences recovering from a stroke, the sum total of this expansive career carefully mediates the balance of outside and inside, sequentially rebuilding a delicate web of cognition, identity, and perception. From the revulsion on a child’s face as Caddy’s recovering body struggles to walk, to the gift of a night nurse revealing her tattoo, these poems defy consolation in their consideration of mortality. Caddy engages readers with his acerbic wit, his base profundity, his downright honesty, and a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners attitude. With the blinkers off, this poetic vision comprehends a fulsome picture of human, and animal, experience—a flawed and loved slideshow of the world.

Genres: Poetry

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2008

Reviews

[Dan Gobble · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed John Caddy's poems! Like the title of this collection, I often found myself taking them in with awe and wonder, "With Mouth[ ] Open Wide". I especially enjoyed the nature poems, but also found the poems on his mother's dementia and the last collection which described some of his experiences of life during and after having had a severe stroke. A very talented writer with an eye for the intriguing details, which may seem ordinary, but using his gift Caddy offers us plenty of snippets and snapshots of this extraordinary thing called being alive on a planet so rich and diverse in life. One of my favorite poems from this collection is titled "Eating the Sting" -

Caught in the snapped circle of light
on the cookshack oilcloth,
an upright deermouse holding yellow
in her fine fingers,
like an ear of black-striped corn,
a wasp I'd slapped dead earlier.

She stares, belly resonating, round above
a scatter of brittle wing, bits, a carapace -
she has already eaten the stinger -
stares at me, still
something thrumming in her eyes

beyond herself, a mouse stung
onto an edge as far from cartoons
as the venom she'd chewed into food.

She cocks a fawn ear now, trembling poisonchanger,
caught in the circle of light
I've thought myself in at times,

but never sure, I ask her softly how
she does it, if I can learn this turning
of sting into such food as startles in her eyes,
learn to suck pain into every sense
and come up spitting seeds, force poison
to a tear held fierce, between my lips
and whirl it into tongue which sings, but

here I've come too loud: She drops the husk,
fusses whiskers with her paws, kicks
a scrap of wing aside, and whispers
thanks for the corn,

steps backward off the table
(and so potent she is with wasp)
flips a circle through light and
lands running on her leaf-toed feet.

John Caddy, "With Mouths Open Wide: New and Selected Poems", Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2008, pp. 77-78.