NH Poetry: Human Half

L.R. Berger recommends The Human Half by Deborah Brown (Boa Editions, Ltd, 2019)

Between the covers of this remarkably beautiful collection Deborah Brown reveals a rich and seemingly improbable universe. While anchored in the map of New England cedar shakes, drooping barns, beetle dung, and the rattle of dried peas in a coffee can, these poems take wide-flung excursions. Brown’s exacting observations and intelligence are so trustworthy we unquestionably want go with her. 

Inside the world of “The Human Half,” Pinocchio lizards coexist with the street dogs of San Juan, Aleppo’s dead, Plato’s cave, and, in Hunan Province, the sighting of a white passion flower thought extinct.  Van Gogh, Vermeer, Vernet, and Matisse all make appearances, along with a mother’s red suit worn to a daughter’s funeral, and a bearded Jonah look-alike cleaning fish at the Oyster River Seafood Market. 

In these poems the unfamiliar serves to shed light on the nature of the often painfully familiar: a brother’s electroshock treatments, a sister’s cancer, war’s borderlands, a child’s whipping, artifacts of a dissolved marriage.  But light is shed heartfully too on the often overlooked beauty where planets protest their innocence.

Here, sightings are sensitively probed for the buried twig of truth, and the whirlwind of otherwise estranged fragments of experience are momentarily an interwoven whole.  How does she do this?

The poet claims I am never quite where I am.  Perhaps it is because she somehow manages to be everywhere.

L.R.Berger’s collection of poems, The Unexpected Aviary, received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. She’s been recipient of fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN New England Discovery Award, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and The American Academy in Rome. With Kamal Boullatta, she assisted in the translation from the Arabic of “Beginnings” by Adonis (Pyramid Atlantic Press). Her new collection, Indebted to Wind is forthcoming this year from Deerbrook Editions Press.  She lives and writes within earshot of the Contoocook River. 

This post is part of our celebration of National Poetry Month 2021 for which I asked New Hampshire poets to recommend books of poetry by Granite State poets. These titles are generally available from local booksellers and may be held in public libraries as well.