151 Book Notes see the labor and sorrow, the victories and joys that life entails, and not merely the Platonic form to which they answer. Give us “April beaten back like a shoreline” (“Self Portrait: Blizzard”) over the stillness, “the inside of a black balloon” (“Frog Loses Sleep Puzzling over Parallel Universes”) over the darkness. Rader’s Works & Days is, like Hesiod’s long poem, ultimately concerned with the metaphysical over the physical. It is not simply an attempt to answer “What is there?” but, more importantly , “What is it like?” Rader works to answer the age-old questions that have troubled us since the days of Hesiod and before, and like Works and Days, Rader’s collection uncovers a number of small, startling truths beneath the nebulous heading of the human condition, such as “This is what we have, says Frog. / Even if the wave function collapses, / we still have this.” Later, in “Waking Next to You on My 39th Birthday or The Other Arm,” he writes: “The waterbirds circle and keep circling.” Like them and like Hesiod, Rader asks and attempts to answer these questions over and over. As readers, we take in the poet’s work and try to do the same. And for all our circling, regardless of what happens, we still have this, whatever this might be. Black Seeds on a White Dish, by Shira Dentz Shearsman Books, 2010 reviewed by Holly Welker Contrast is at the heart of Shira Dentz’s first collection of poetry , Black Seeds on a White Dish, a volume in which “Something at the edge of danger / Turns into its opposite, and circles” (“The Wind of Madness Has Broken a Skin”). Over and over, these poems explore how longing, love, and lust turn into bereavement , betrayal, and abandonment; how speech turns into silence; how presence turns into absence; and what’s left when we confront these painful transformations. The concept of the present absence, a fond and futile remembrance of someone irrevocably lost, is first explored in English in John Donne’s poem “Present in Absence.” “To hearts that cannot vary,” Donne writes, “Absence is Presence, Time doth tarry.” But the hearts in Black Seeds on a White Dish are all too colorado review 152 variable; therefore absence is absence, and although the speaker in Dentz’s book might have searched for “something that felt eternal, / something to count on” (“The Night Is My Purse, and Here’s What I Empty Out:”), time does anything but stand still. Dedicated to Dentz’s younger brother, Asher, the book may well have emerged from the poet’s need “to write a requiem to the universe, even if it lasted only 40 seconds” for a loss so profound it’s both incomprehensible and unutterable. After the loss of “A son, a brother” in “The Grasses Unload Their Grief,” grieving survivors grapple not only with loss but the shame it engenders, ending up so emotionally deadened they seem mute: Instead of words, my mother uttered syllables that fit onto silver teaspoons whose glossy oval backs flew into the sky. Instead of words, my father blew cinders. This emotional muteness is one of the most threatening elements of the book. “To speak is to cross onto a highway,” we read in “I carry”; certainly this is a world where speech is always dangerous and sometimes impossible. Blurbs for the book repeatedly reference the phrase “nothing to do but let the form of things take over,” the final line from “Autobiography,” a poem that brilliantly captures the terror of this pervasive muteness , part of a hell as banal and horrible as any Sartre could imagine: I was afraid my life would be like visiting my grandparents when I was little: green carpet, big ugly sofas, and no one having anything to say. It’s not just grief that renders people mute, however, but the disconnect between those who remain. A bubby “always alive and dying” resolutely “sticks to her rule never to talk to old people or goyim” (“10:01”). “Poem for my mother who wishes she were a lilypad in a Monet painting” declares that the sound of the mother’s “voice has always been a...
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May 9, 2023
Ian Brinton 
