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  • Cover

When I read lines like these from the poem, "Linguini" in Diane Lockward's second collection of poetry, What Feeds Us:

Linguini witnessed our slurping, pulling, and
sucking, our unraveling and raveling, chins
glistening, napkins tucked like bibs in collars,
linguini stuck to lips, hips, and bellies

I expect to flip the book and see on the back a young woman with dyed black hair living in New York or Brooklyn. This expectation comments more on my stereotypes and preconceptions about sexuality and sensuality than it comments on the book. When I picked up What Feeds Us, I knew that externally, at least, Diane Lockward was not a young, hip, pierced woman. What I knew about her is that she is a kind and thoughtful person, and an accomplished poet committed to both the craft and the community of poetry. I now know that those two images are wrongly at odds for me. Reading Diane Lockward's What Feeds Us, I found it both sexy and literate, both arousing and nurturing. What Feeds Us is a deft interweaving of two of my author fantasies: the hip young woman from New York that I might desire for my bed and the kind friend I might want for my head. Let me be plain, What Feeds Us is the most sensuous and erotically charged book that I have read all year, which is to say that it delighted, and even fed, me.

Published by Wind Publications, What Feeds Us gathers forty-five poems together in four sections plus the title poem. These are poems in the traditions of great narrative and lyrical verse. Closely observed and with great attention to language, Lockward's poems at times echo the work of Maxine Kumin as well as Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. Food, of course, figures strongly into this collection, both as a subject for the poems but also as the central trope to illumine other subjects, in particular family and intimate relationships.

Lockward begins the book with an epigraph from M. F. K. Fischer, anchoring the book in both women's literary traditions and in culinary traditions. In addition to the linguini above, each section of the book begins with fruit or vegetables. In the first section, Lockward begins, "Though everyone said no one could grow/artichokes in New Jersey, my father/planted the seeds and grew one magnificent artichoke. . . ." Here the artichoke becomes a symbol for the family's demise. The artichoke, like the family, is the thing that grows where it shouldn't, although only one special time. Lockward writes,

Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart,
the way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds
of the artichokes in my father's garden bloomed
without him, their blossoms seven inches wide
and violet-blue as bruises.

Lockward makes us eat with her "piece by piece" and watch the pain as both the artichoke comes apart and the family unravels with large painful blossoms. This synesthesia, dancing between taste and pain as well as vision and pain, is characteristic of Lockward's work. She pays close attention to all of the senses and works them with both harmony and cacophony.

The second section of What Feeds Us begins with the blueberry "deep-blue hue of the body, silvery bloom/on its skin." Lockward's close observation is demonstrated here in conjunction with her attention to the sounds of language-the three lines alternating between aspiratives and sibilants. Lockward's attention to the aural and lingual aspects of the language is another hallmark of her writing throughout the book.

The line between animal and vegetable is a tenuous one in What Feeds Us. In the third section of the book, Lockward writes, "my parents warned me/if I ate one more pickle,/ I would turn into one." These observations of the connections between animals and vegetables are both playful and rueful. Merging herself with the pickle, Lockward concludes the poem, "I barely remember/being a girl or the scent of my mother's perfume." Lockward neither wallows in difficult memories nor looks away; she does what poets do with difficult memories: writes trenchant poems.

The fourth section, returning from the journey through childhood drama, returns to sensuality and begins with these lines:

Peculiar, the way it starts out small,
then swells to a big fat bottom cupped
in my hand. I wish I could love it

Lockward is writing about a pear. The poem is called "Seduction." These are the sorts of revelations that Lockward's poems make. She teases and titillates; she starts out small and then swells our imagination. This is one of many examples of the erotic moves found throughout the book.

Perhaps one of the most erotically charged poems is at the end of the book. Although I hesitate to use that word phrase, "erotically charged," because the poems are not an appeal to eros; they are a reflection of living in a body that is, of course, at times sexual and sensual and erotic, but also, and perhaps more often, utilitarian. Lockward understands this corporeality. Her poem "Idiosyncrasies of the Body" accomplishes its work, not by evoking sensuality but by denying it. Lockward begins, "I'm the kind of woman/who never skips a meal," and continues, "I never appear naked in front of anyone./When I bathe, I always lock/the door." These denials continue through the six stanzas of the poem until she concludes,

I have never walked naked
in front of a man, not my husband
or my lovers, and do not know
how it feels to be a goddess
in front of a man,
how to bring him to his knees.

Though, of course, this must be a constructed narrator, because this poet knows how to do exactly that. A fact she demonstrates repeatedly in What Feeds Us.

In her first collection, Eve's Red Dress, Lockward accomplished a similar tension of ironic self-knowledge. In the final poem, "My Husband Discovers Poetry," she writes,

Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.

The poem concludes with the husband finding the poem of connubial rejection in the basement. Lockward observes him, "his shoulders hunched over and shaking,/fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?/It was my husband paying tribute to my art."

The body in What Feeds Us is not only in service to sex and sensuality, although I may wish it to be. Lockward's treatment of our physical beings is greater than any one aspect of the body. In "You Should Avoid Doctors," Lockward begins with the litany of the reasons to avoid doctors and ends with

you're overweight, or under, need more exercise,
less caffeine, and everything you love
is dangerous. You've never been this exposed.

Here she surprises us with the rawness of her observations. Contrasting "everything" with "never" in those two adjacent lines, Lockward paints us into a corner, forcing us again and again to examine the reality of the human condition: dangerous, exposed, and yet still worthy of the praise of these words.

What Feeds Us also has smart and occasionally sassy poems. Lockward's word bank is extensive, a joy for readers with a dictionary at hand or for word lovers who experience pleasure when they reencounter words that have been lost from daily usage. Sometimes Lockward gently mocks her erudition, as in the poem, "The Best Words." She reviews words that by themselves titillate or inspire snickers, such as asinine and poppycock, often to the contrary of their seriousness or utility.

What Feeds Us is a fine collection. It demonstrates a range of emotion, style, and craft. For me, the only places where Lockward's poems don't sing with the clarity of a bell choir are the few dramatic monologues that she has included in the collection. They are fun and playful, but they read more like writing exercises than the other fully realized poems of the collection, which are clear and sonorous in their execution. What Feeds Us is also an ample book at eighty-two pages. Lockward has reduced her offerings from the one hundred ten pages in her first book, Eve's Red Dress. Such heft is pleasing to many readers, but I wonder what it would be like to read her third collection pared down to a scant forty-eight or sixty pages, including only the sharpest and most electrifying poems. I believe that would be a powerfully resonant volume.

Until that next one is available, however, enjoy What Feeds Us all the way to the final poem, "Pyromania." It begins, "The heart wants what the heart wants,/and what it wants is fire." In the poem, the narrator tells of a friend who ended a relationship because "There's no fireworks." Lockward then writes that she learned,

that silicone in the breasts
must be excised before cremation
or it blows up, liquefying to a dangerous substance,
destroying the crematorium.

This macabre set of facts is followed by Lockward's confession, "I'd like to have breasts like that." Drawn into this dangerous and sensuous world, we as readers are propelled to the ending. Lockward concludes this poem and the book with these lines,

I'd like my breasts to burst into flame,
spreading like wildfire,
tongues of scarlet licking the walls.
I'd like breasts just that white-hot
as once they were under the touch
of my lover, so recently departed.
I'd like to burn the crematorium down.

Wouldn't we all? Wouldn't we all? I imagine Lockward burning down the crematorium; the image in my mind morphing from my stereotype about women's sexuality, which hinges on youth, to another image, still corporeal but now ageless or even aging as a result of reading Diane Lockward's book What Feeds Us. This transformation may not be what Lockward envisioned as she wrote these poems and gathered together the manuscript, but ultimately the work of poetry is transformation. By that measure, as well as many others, What Feeds Us succeeds.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer in University Park, MD, USA. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.