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These poems shift comfortably back and forth between the personal and the global as Susan Rich creates a brew that is both satisfying and intoxicating. She is at ease in a local grocery store or in a foreign market. She is as gentle with real people as she is with imaginary lovers. This well-traveled poet draws inspiration from the ordinary people she's met as well as from the extraordinary artists and photographers whose works she has encountered in museums. The opening poem, "Different Places to Pray," ends with this question: "Tell me, where do you go to pray--a river valley, a pastry tray?" Susan Rich offers us those places and more. These are beautifully crafted poems, written by a poet who clearly knows her craft.

Susan Rich is a true wordsmith, someone who crafts the written visual. This was purchased as a gift; however I was fortunate enough to be allowed to enjoy some of the works. I have since purchased another of her books for myself.

The Alchemist's Kitchen, by Susan Rich, published by White Pine Press ([...]).

To say that this compilation is a lovely and simple collection would be false. "Simple" could be taken to mean childlike, or unsophisticated, which it most certainly isn't. By simple I mean that the poetry is understandable and personal, not so cluttered and overly nuanced that it becomes incapable of eliciting emotion.

Emotion abounds in this collection, which is divided into three parts: Incantation, Transformation and Song. Each section has its own beauty, and there is a delicate feel that at times becomes jagged and pointed, enough to make you sit up and re-read the stanza. This is not a poetry book to sit back and feel relaxed by, but rather one to slowly meditate upon.

The people drawn within it are complicated: in one moment trying to determine if a noise is simply thunder or an airstrike, while choosing what breakfast cereal to eat. They carefully choose a lipstick for a dance that may be their last. They discuss their travels with a dying parent whose only journey is from hospital bed to bath. They are painful and yet some are light and airy.

One of my favorites: from Song,
"You Might Consider"

how my long life of losing men
could create a new international sport.

Men lost in the desert, men missing
in action from doorways and all night diners;

men making the most of fire
escapes, service stairs, the emergency aisle

of airplanes like United. Men
para-sailing after spaceship encounters.

I am accomplished in the world
of the see-you-later save

as his pick up truck disappears
traveling on to the next espresso stand.

Something in the curve of my collar,
the cut of my blouse sets them running.

They know they are in the hands of a master.
But when the coffee's on, the pumpernickel

toasted just right, I have to let them know;
I'm actually ready to let them go." p.87

In "Transcendence", she uses the musical phrase,
"plastic curtains ecstatic as castanets." Words like that are mesmerizing, and I kept finding segments equally unique and beautiful, compiling an instant mental picture.

In some of the poems she discusses the genocide in Srebrenica, and at times she refers to a 'Sarajevo Rose'. I had to look that up, and I've included a picture (above). A Sarajevo Rose is the location of a mortal shell attack that killed some one, some person, some individual that meant more than just a mark on the pavement. The damaged area is then filled with red wax, as a rememberance. That strange mix of memory and horror with a tiny dash of shocking color is what too many have lived through, and in a lyrical way Rich manages to link her poems with that same emotional impact.

A powerful book about transformation. So evocative these poems and their imagery: “In the beginning, we wanted / to cast ourselves / as opera stars, to break apart / like gorgeous women / palm reading at the piano bar— / music stinging like salt from the sea.” I just love them. Susan Rich travels the world in her work—genocide in Bosnia, refugees in Nairobi, the national library burnt to the ground in Sarajevo, community college students in Seattle (“Portrait with Lorca” is one of my favorites). I especially love the section of poems about Myra Albert Wiggins, a female photographer at the turn of the twentieth century. “Real original, this girl—a bicycle, a camera, / other newfangled tools” recalls the poem from Mr. Myra Albert Wiggins’s perspective. A gem of a collection.

Don't read Susan Rich's latest book on an empty stomach. Although The Alchemist's Kitchen contains a wide, intelligent, and thought-provoking variety of poems, it does food better than most of the restaurants I've been in.

A sample from the Kitchen's kitchen:

"...a spoon glistening with pomegranate seeds..."

"...we'll sip cups of Arabic coffee, linger with lavender chocolate..."

"...Vietnamese coriander, Thai basil, Chinese leaves..."

"...taste cheeses lined up like small children: asiago, machango, a drunken goat spread from Spain..."

My favorite food poem in Rich's collection is "Chanterelle," which asks the reader to compare poetry to a "gourmet grocery shop." Poets can experiment with forms whose traditions they may not know well, just as chefs can make use of herbs whose names they cannot pronounce. But a poem will never be something it's not. The reader--"the check-out girl" in the poem's extended metaphor--will see to this, ringing it up accurately. Nevertheless, it is the poet's obligation--like the gourmet shop's-- to offer the unusual and the exquisite and to resist "the safe way" (which, if I'm reading Rich correctly, is a play on Safeway, where my mother used to shop in Washington, D.C., before Whole Foods came to town).

The last line of the poem--"Bring home a mango/muddle it with Kosher salt"--speaks eloquently to the intentions of the collection as a whole. This isn't a book with a single focus, although if Rich wanted to write an entire collection about food--heck, about an unsalted mango alone--I'd read it. No, The Alchemist's Kitchen is indeed a muddle--a fortunate muddle, a compelling muddle. In addition to poems about food, The Alchemist's Kitchen contains poems about the wars in Bosnia and Somalia, about the photographer and painter Myra Albert Wiggins, and, perhaps most winningly, about love and growing old.

Favorites:

"An Army of Ellipses Traveling Over All She Does Not Say..." leaves readers to fill in most of the horrors of the war in Somalia, but includes this poignant, un-elided image of a woman sitting by the open window of a bus who:

lost her bracelets, and her wrist

to the handiwork of bandits.

"Not a Still Life" is a summing up, in loose sonnet form, of Myra Albert Wiggins' rich life and art. But as successful as Wiggins' career was, the poem tells us:

...what she wanted most has all but disappeared.
The museum walls, the fame--the name not written here.

When reading poems about visual artists' work, one is often tempted to look up the original work, which of course I did. But truth be told, Rich's descriptions of Wiggins' photographs and paintings are vivid enough to make this exercise redundant.

In addition to her descriptive powers, Rich handles psychological portraits with aplomb. While she credits Carole Glauber's The Witch of Kodakry: The Photography of Myra Albert Wiggins, 1869-1956 for informing and jumpstarting her Wiggins' poems, it's hard to imagine Glauber's biography being both as succinct and insightful as, say, "Mr. Myra Albert Wiggins Recalls Their Arrangement":

...And so if there were men
of Salem, Toppenish, Seattle, lovely and rich--

who snickered at our last-season suits
and sequined gowns, who hinted not infrequently--

that a husband should not be so happy
packing picture frames and mounting

photographs. Christ. They knew nothing.

My favorite of favorites? "At Middle-Life: A Romance," whose energetic, imperative opening--"Let love be imminent and let it be a train"--sets the appealing, optimistic tone. Oh--and there's a (scrumptious, of course) food reference ("Let love be a breakfast of crème cakes, pomegranate juice, a lively Spanish torte").

Given the menu, who wouldn't want to indulge?