Echoes: Poems Left Behind

by John Ciardi

Poems consider the past, parenthood, mortality, success, misunderstanding, sleep, love, and travel.

Genres: Poetry

65 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 1989

About the author

John Anthony Ciardi was an American poet, translator, editor, writer and etymologist.

Reviews

[Eve Castle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems by John Ciardi and his 1975 book on the craft ‘How Does a Poem Mean’ were some of the earliest poetry influences in my life. This 65-page collection of poems was collated by Betty Williams who deserves mention because it flowed exceptionally well. It was published posthumously by Judith Ciardi in 1989 (John died March 30, 1986). It includes 45 poems of which only 9 have appeared in collections after his death (none appeared in collections published in his lifetime.)

I can recommend it for reading and even for study. It’s enjoyable and sufficiently complex for lovers of poetry as well as writers of poetry. The first handful of poems were about poetry and/or the writing process. I loved them so much and as all poets know, most readers of poetry are other poets! I started thinking, why do we write poetry if not for other poets or for ourselves? So if you write poetry, write what you want to write, or better yet, write for the other poets also in the struggle.

In the first poem, One Easter Not on the Calendar I Woke, Ciardi muses on his dog “sprawled at my feet, happy enough to breathe” and talks about rabbits in the dog’s dreaming…

“…His habit is rabbits,
mine is pages. All night in the tomb
the ghosts of pages walk—white revelations—
but when I wake still clutching the one I caught,
it is always blank. I roll the stone away
and try to remember, and cannot, never enough.”

There is a theme of God (in poem Dear Sir Ciardi directly addresses God) and religious references sprinkled throughout but it’s not overwhelming. As is obvious to many on the stanza I shared above when he used “roll the stone away” as part of the night in the tomb reference.

Other sections and themes that follow include odes, poems honoring love, bemoaning aging, connections with others, and observances of nature. In his poem, Late Peaches, this stanza stood out to me:

“but these mornings I look out at the peach tree,
and when the mist has dried to diamond points
I see my mother, dried to starch and parchment,
drift from the day like milkweed, pause,

and there, as if she meant to light a candle
inside each peach, stand by the tree and be.”

One of the most memorable poems for me was called Matins, in 4 stanzas in abbacc rhyme scheme Ciardi invites you into a frozen night in Paris:

“It froze in Paris last night and a rag doll
that had been a woman too tattered-old to notice
turned up stiff on a bench. So the police,
who spend least on the living, paid to haul
nothing to nothing. She could have lived for a week
on what the bureau will spend on paper work;”

I’ll end by mentioning that Ciardi’s poem, A Trenta-Sei of the Pleasure We Take in the Early Death of Keats, introduces us to a poetic form he created. It’s 6 stanzas of 6 lines each, rhyme scheme is ababcc (he used many visual as well as sound rhymes) and each line of the 1st stanza becomes the first line of the corresponding stanza. So using lines 2-5 of the first stanza: Line 2 becomes line 1 of stanza 2, line 3 becomes line 1 of stanza 3, etc.. You can google the form but I only found one other poem using this form. I sense a challenge, do you?

All in all, great selection of poems, especially wonderful for other poets who understand how masterful Ciardi was. You can sense his love “of trying.”

One of my favorite Ciardi quotes:

The craft [of poetry] is not easy. It is better than easy. It is joyously difficult.

[michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is printed on some of the nicest paper