But the poems that draw me most to Wheeler’s book are the ones that scrutinize her parents’ divorce, and her father’s terminal illness, set against the exotic language of New Zealand, where she is based. From the beginning, the poems play on the idea of a “fault,” both the geological fault, or rift in the stone (of which there are major ones running through New Zealand), and the sense of offense or misdeed—the speaker has traveled to New Zealand, only to be informed of her parents’ “no-fault” divorce: “My father,/eighty-five, in congestive heart failure,/conducting affairs with women my age./Structural losses are yet to be gauged.” The landscape colors everything: “Feelings here/hike through a topography/of collision, magpie and tui,//continental plates” (“Grant Report, New Zealand”). In part of a sonnet from a larger sonnet sequence (“Damages, 2011”), she creates extended metaphors that bind the earth’s foundations to self in tight couplets:
Just blocks from Parliament, Robert Sullivan
reads poems for Maori soldiers in the Italian
campaign, and more on foreshore-seabed rights—
who owns Aotearoa’s littoral zones. Despite
how one goes on, divorce isn’t disaster.
Don’t rate my family upset on the Richter
scale. Not metaphor, but metonymy,
the professor says, fixing the slippery
word on the board. Not erasure but a close
thing. I am far from what one might call home,
someone with a faultless sense of self.
The jutting peaks, the continental shelf.
Wheeler’s love of poetic structure is felt in her incorporation of text and imitation of poetic traditions. The undercurrent of poetic tradition beneath these poems continues to surface, from “Pure Products of America” (modeled on Williams’ “To Elsie”) to “Sticky” (which quotes Frost’s “Design,” giving it a contemporary twist), to “The Sun Went Down Then I Felt Sad” (which builds from reverberations of Bishop’s “The Fish”). It may be true that, as one of Wheeler’s titles from a Williams line states, “It is difficult to get the news from poems,” but she reports in a singular fashion.
The prose poems that entirely comprise Kathleen McGookey’s Stay work like sponges soaking up water—in this case the psychic leaps and metaphors in the tightly wrought boxes she hammers them into. McGookey carefully arranges the scraps of each moment for maximum voltage. In “Sometimes the Ache Sleeps,” we find the juxtaposition of life’s joys with great pain: