Snake at the Wrist

Somewhere Shakespeare said something very much like this. He may have had in mind what Margaret Kaufman is up to. It seems to me she is a poet of painful processes. If a spiritual life is to deepen and gain texture, complexity and strength, the practitioner must bravely engage every sorrowful circumstance and encounter in her history. Isn't that what Kaufman is doing here? Yes, I believe it is. She is doing her spiritual work. She is doing it well, and we who accompany her on the journey are inspired by her effort even as we find ourselves renewed in grappling with our own work. Robert McDowell, author of the forthcoming Poetry In Spiritual Practice

Though intimate and painfully honest, these poems are not confessionals; instead they reveal a world in which their speakers had a hand in shaping and in which they also hold a stake. From the speckled apple of the opening poem that is out of the speaker's reach to the pomegranate seeds Persephone ingests to keep her tethered to her darker half, to the persistent sweet peas of the closing poem, the speakers learn that to be in the world fully, with body and spirit, one must let go of the habitual comforts of illusions. Many of the poems in this collection are ostensibly about loss. Death in the family, the withering away of love in marriage and in other human arrangements, the yearly spectacle of ruin in the garden, these are the "conclusive" losses that bring the dramatic arc to the poems, but these narrative turns are like a "forked pole," there to support the graduation of an insight from green sapling to ripened fruit. Loss, "what's dead," is the fertile ground, the attentively tended plot of these poems, from which a greater understanding and a deeper love for the world can flower. In this sense, Margaret Kaufman's poems, like the free-flying red-winged blackbirds of the poem "Fennel," "...land where they have to land,/so delicately sped, shouldering/to perch on impermanence,/to rest on the strength of what's dead."