Here from Away
Kate Bernadette Benedict
Custom Words Paper
132 pp
ISBN: 1-932339-25-6

his is an urban book, and a woman's book. Kate Benedict portraying herself, whether in real life or in imaginary life, as wife, ex-nun, political activist, or horrified Grand Juror, is unfailingly tender, feminine, compassionate, and brave enough to risk playing the buffoon with her comic villanelles. A multi-varied talent shows through in both formal and free verse, but it is her rich approach to both language and life that makes these poems so engaging.

Many of the poems are about the city  the park, the building the poet lives in and the neighbors she and her husband share it with: the Stinky [bag] Lady and her raucous cry when she's rousted from where she's not wanted; Mattie and Ricky who died and left the poet musing: "I don't believe in ghosts./ That isn't Ricky's Peugeot chained to the banister/ nor Mattie's cane tapping the marble step./ This is only me, remembering them,/ wondering why I never wept for them." Among the "building" poems, probably the most memorable, and certainly the most poignant, is "A Man and A Woman Descending A Stair." It's a verbal portrait of her husband accompanying a mentally-disturbed neighbor up and down the stairs to "keep her safe until the medics come." The way the poet's affection matches her mate's compassion offers a model of marriage and a view of raw emotion that few poems dare even to venture.

In literary magazines, newspapers, poetry contests, and all over the internet I've read, along with everyone else, a thousand hokey 911 poems, and then I come here upon the last strophe of a three-part poem. Two pages are devoted to a charming fantasy of World peace and parity, the sharing of languages and customs, the fun we could all have together if we could just leave aside our ignorant fear and disrespect of one another. The poem ends:

To commemorate the end of the final war,
let monuments be draped in purple silk.

And when Pax Mundi is somewhere broken—
for peace is fragile and will be broken—
let every other nation recognize its own body as broken.
The body will rally, the wound heal.

This is my vision, however naive, however utopian.
I hold it out to you, though you will not grasp it in your lifetime.
For now, come walk with me in my damaged city
where we recover from a great violence
and wait for a great violence.
It is spring now, and one million daffodils bloom
in one million tiny plots of soil.
They were given by The Netherlands,
a nation that cries with us,
and dreads with us.
and sends flowers
as a friend will when a friend ails.
They are everywhere you look.
They are all I could possibly want.
They are so richly yellow, so terrifyingly delicate.
They light this darkness with their perennial gold.

Reader, try reading those last four lines aloud without tears. I couldn't.

Go look for Kate Benedict in Eratosphere, where her perceptive critiques in the Non-Metrical Verse section keep things hopping and people coming back.

© Sandy McKinney