Susan Astor’s Spider Lies: Web of Firm, Glistening Lines
Susan Astor
Spider Lies
124 Pages
$20.00
11 Richlee Court
Mineola,New York 11501
Phone: 516-873-2547
E-mail: sastor@optonline.net
Wherever the reader lands in Susan Astor’s book, Spider Lies, she/he finds threads of simile and metaphor that combined with the language of plainsong are lines of extraordinary, exquisite and powerful beauty.
And ideas! American poetry is rich with unique subjects and Ms. Astor has them: Grandmother’s Veins--"a map I learned to read," Slip of the Tongue--"A flicker of bright thought/. . .A kiss turned serious," Dream Before Sleep--"A shadow slides around the corners of the bedroom wall:/ a car is passing Main Street," Nana--"I come to you out of the thin air/ high above the Andes;/. . . Chile is the land I dream: so lean, so beautiful," Ocean of Snow--"One year the snow rolled in so high/we thought we were an island./ Behind the pilings of the porch/waves crested almost to the sky,/ then stopped."
For fun look at The Wife of God I and II. . .
I
. . .
For eons, she airs out the sky,
plumps up the clouds and wonders why
she has no friends.
Meanwhile, He’s omnipresent elsewhere
inspecting planets, lustering the hair of angels.
. . .
Like every good wife everywhere
she makes notations, answers prayers,
keeps track of constellations. . .
II
One night when He is late (again)
and she has too much time to spend
igniting meteors, mending
black holes in the universe,
she looks out at the vast array
of planets and of atoms and says
Hey! I am creative too.
It is this kind of interesting, witty,strong language of feeling that makes up this creation of poetry. Poems that deal with human foibles are catching like The Lies You Told--"bourbon lies/ and betting lies/ and lies about the bills." Of course, there is her title poem, Spider Lies--"the tiny white ones/ hanging by their slender threads/ almost invisible/ almost impossible to catch/ they could be anywhere. . ."
Ms. Astor is fascinatingly innovative. In Mushrooms she uses these organisms as stand-ins for the immigrants whose uncertain status she calls to our attention, "pale and bewildered/ in their wide-brimmed hats/. . .One kick is a pogrom/ The little bodies shudder, crumble. . ., " an allusion to the Holocaust about which a mother tells her daughter in Learning the Holocaust:
I think of you in Auschwitz,
smoke filling your nostrils
the whole of you filling with despair.
In Space Travel Ms. Astor offers an astronomical aura to her love poems: "sky eyes/blue light bright/ each one a band of atmosphere/ around a tiny galaxy of black/ they are one way to enter you. . ." In this context she helps us feel the spiritual and biological extent of time from the beginnings. Picturing "autumn in Eden," in The Fall, she tells us that "In the garden, a pair of people grow/ rosy and unknowing as a pair of pears./ Inside them are our seeds." In Primordial Love Poem Ms. Astor gives us the poet doing the business of poetry, here putting the biology of reproduction into the beauty of language: "In the ocean of the poet, like an animal/ about to be elaborated from a single cell,/ the song begins." The feeling emanates from her rich language telling us that every biological uniting and birthing parallels the chronology of evolution from when "the cell, its membrane reaching out toward other life . . . all of this began. . ."
There is a delightful section (she divides the book into sections), "Bestiary of Dreams:" The Spider’s Dream, The Dinosaur’s. . . The Whale’s. . . The Sloth’s. . . The Flea’s. . . "Deep in my sleep deep in your fur/ I dream I am what you wish you were/ A tiny hyphen safe as a seed/ With only a minuscule mouth to feed. . ." Here Ms. Astor rhymes which she does frequently. She is a poet, formal and informal
The Whale’s Dream
Sing me to sleep
Sing deep sing deep
Sing of the sea
Sing low
Dive down the night
Rise into day
Sing to me as you go
Love is a liquid
I drink I drink
Life is a liquid I swim
Sky is an ocean
Where fish have wings
This lullaby is a hymn
Sing in your sleep
Sing low sing low
Sing me your dreams
Dream deep
Sing of the lull and crush of the waves
Dream me into your sleep
October 2008, Ms. Astor was honored by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association with its Long Island Poet of the Year Award. Cynthia Shor, Executive Director, said "This is our most prestigious annual honor, given to Susan Astor as a Long Island poet who has distinguished herself through her esteemed body of poetic writings, her devotion to poetry education, and her continuous support of the poetry community of Long Island. She was selected by unanimous decision of our Board of Trustees who recognized her attributes as an exemplary writer and teacher, and thus, most deserving of this exclusive honor."
Ms. Astor has worked 26 years as a Poet-in-the-Schools. She has helped more than 25,000 Long Islanders as youngsters know that they have the ability to write poems that are literature. See her article Writing Lyric Poetry.
"Children’s poems are examples of poetry in its purest form," asserts Ms. Astor, consultant for the Nassau County Poet Laureate School Poetry Contest, 2008-09, conducted by Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr., Nassau County Poet Laureate. "They are well-condensed, well-detailed, emotionally intense and frequently lyrical. Like all literature, they provide meaningful insights into the human condition. Some of the finest literature today is being written in the classroom.
Learning the Holocaust
for Doris Kemp
"But the Nazis didn’t hurt children," says my daughter,
only a trace of question in her voice.
For the first time since her infancy
I see how breakable she is:
bones, delicate under their pink padding,
teeth, new and scrubbed and neatly rowed.
"Yes," I say, "They did."
Her hair, too soft to be gathered
is brushed down smooth, almost translucent
over the pale shell of her skull.
Inside, her brain throbs like an embryo.
What is she thinking now?
I think of you in Auschwitz,
smoke filling your nostrils
the whole of you filling with despair.
My daughter rallies her small forces:
"But not if they did everything the Nazis told then to?"
How easily she could be twisted, separated, thrown.
I once read that the Nazis would fill up a Jewish uterus
with something like cement to seal it shut.
And I think of you again
how you endured the unendurable
how now, grown rosy and complete
you hold a grandson in your arms
nobody’s victim.
I will not lie, I tell myself, I will not cry.
I think about my daughter’s fruit-shaped womb
her tiny improbable seeds.
"Yes. " I say, "They hurt them even then."
