Late Psalm

The title for Betsy Sholl's latest book of poetry comes from the fact that it considers 'the themes of those ancient songs of joy and grief,' but the examination comes 'late' in that it was written 'in an age defined by questioning and irony.' What results is something as beautiful as some of the psalms, and many of the poems might have as much lasting value.

Combining intellectual and experiential sensation, the poems are concerned mostly with the conundrums of life, such as 'how all our lives we burn / for something that trembles just out of reach. / It would be better if we didn't talk / about it, these green leaves flickering, / little parables, trying to explain / what it takes to break wood into blossom[,]' ('It Would Be Better If We Didn't Talk About It').

At the tip of Sholl's pen, the mundane becomes marvelous, such as a lobster tank in 'At the Public Market,' 'which looks / more like the world unformed and void, / stirred by a mind feeling that sluggish urge / to make itself known, a mind struggling / into form, water to gel, to claw and tail, / oozing its way out of slime, stumbling / among bottom feeders, grovelers, creeps / all bunched up, feelers adither / over their future's watery inferno;' but it is hard to tell if she is describing the lobsters, an onlooker studying them, or herself. It is, wonderfully, equally hard to discern the lobster tank from the real world, 'where a few black beads fiercely eye back ? / grabbers and pinchers clawing their way / to the top of some little heap. / And for what? I suddenly have to ask, / trembling, here, in the middle of my life.'

As with any good poet, Sholl's endings are the most remarkable, a case in point being the ending to 'Half the Music,' where she writes, 'I can't talk about the little bird / I found on the sidewalk this morning, / sparrow-like, with brown flecks on its wings / and a bright yellow belly, I picked up / and held, its death in my hands, and my heart / flying full speed as if straight at plate glass.'

Other subjects that gain Sholl's attention included the vagaries of aging ('We're on the fritz, he says, meaning my frail / mother with her panic and tears, her broken / words like birds on a wire that scatter / and rebunch, one note hopping to the end / of the line, so the song's frayed, always / changing, and my mother weeps that she can't / keep it straight, weeps like someone with no tongue, / who can't say what she knows, though we strain / to grasp like woodsmen chasing / some mythical bird song into thick forests[