Cobin, Susan: What You Choose

Description

Broadstone Books, paperback

Publication Date: March 15, 2024

Publisher Marketing: In her debut collection, poet Susan Cobin conjures cock-eyed mirror worlds that reflect what our own might better be Some poets describe the world; others imagine worlds of words into being, cock-eyed mirrors that often reveal more than mere “reality.” In her first collection (after many years of honing her craft), what poet Susan Cobin has chosen is the latter course, with delightful results, as in her title poem where she invites us to remember each of us is but “a puffy bird on a simple planet.” Asking why people avoid the rain, she observes “It’s as though / they are afraid / of what their own / bodies are filled with. // Stick a camellia / in that man’s / mouth and he’s useful / as a vase.” In “The Gardener and the Wife” she pulls back the curtain on the act of such poetic creation, opening with a titillating scene of “The rough gardener / with the thorny hands” who “wants my wife / to undo the neat row / of pearly buttons” – except, as she admits a stanza or so later, “I’ve imagined this / gardener, and I don’t / have a wife.” She invites us to do likewise: “You and I will create / a gardener and a wife. / In daylight they’ll dance / without their shoes / or pale combs. / They’ll whisper so softly / we’ll almost hear / their names.” But just as we succumb to the magic of such imagination, in the end, like a tossed stone breaking the illusory reflection of still water, she jerks us back into the real world with its Holocaust of “the souls of six million / that rise // in the curling smoke of an extinguished / candle.” What you choose, then – what we are called upon to choose – is to imagine a better world into being on this “simple planet.”