Review by Lynn Wagner
 
WHAT FEEDS US
by Diane Lockward
 
Wind Publications, 600 Overbrook Dr., Nicholasville, KY 40356; ISBN# 1-893239-57-8, 2006, 85pp., $15.00, softcover.

http://windpub.com/
 
Diane Lockward is sly, sexy and hungry. She knows what it is to be afraid. These elements satisfy in her second book, What Feeds Us. Outwardly Lockward talks of fruit and family while her characters walk into the unknown. The title poem promises as much in its last section:

In my story, Eve walked out of the Garden,
unencumbered by Adam
and carrying only the apple.
She didn’t know where she was going,
but she knew she’d need something to eat.

The poems that follow are chock full of unknowns: a father who walks out on a family, a mother absent while getting electro-shock treatments, and a central character that feeds on sex and longs for desire. This hunger has an edge, expressed in a type of doubletalk that stands for wit. In "The Tomato Envies the Peach" the speaker is the tomato: "tossed in a pot for sauce, beaten / and most horribly mashed with wooden spoon..." For the peach, there is only love from the lady of the house: "So careful she is / not to bruise it, squeezing between finger and thumb, / coaxing ripeness."
 
Reading Lockward the mind must be at work and at rest to apprehend the disembodied pull of the spirit. Poems can operate on multiple levels simultaneously--through ideas in the mind (a poem's argument or story), in the much more sensual world evoked by an image, by sound, and arrangement. When idea and object are farthest apart they can be brooked by wit.
 
The connections take many forms, from bees that threaten to sting to a mammogram that recalls the swirling clouds of a hurricane. What Feeds Us is a search for the heart of the matter, for origins and prohibitions. Like Lockward's first book, Eve's Red Dress, these poems are in love with words, including "The Best Words:"

The ones that sound obscene but aren't,
that put a finger to the flame but don’t burn.
Words like asinine, poppycock, titmouse, tit for tat,
woodpecker, pecorino, poop deck, and beaver.

that continue in an alluring list of two dozen more of the best words with bite.
 
But it is in her formal moments that I appreciate Lockward's wit most. Standing in her nether zone of flower, fruit and flesh, she spins poems with couplets and her own takes of "Undone Triolet" and "Love Test: A Ghazal." A well done concrete poem "Organic Fruit" is "schmoo-shaped" and contains in its beginnings these well-wrought lines:

the avocado, renegade
fruit, strict individualist, pear
gone crazy. Praise to its skin

The poem and the fruit expand to hold:

avocado yields to the knife, surrenders its hide
        of leather,
blade sliding under the skin and stripping the
        fruit. Praise
to its nakedness posed before me, homely,
        yellow-green.

"Organic Fruit" is more than meets the eye and pleases the ear and the mind with a solid, satisfying end. Through fear and family tragedy Lockward finds a way to soothe appetites with poems.
 
 

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Lynn Wagner has poems in Shenandoah, Chautauqua Literary Review, Rhino, 5AM and forthcoming in Subtropics and others. In 2004 she won the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in poetry and was awarded a fellowship to the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts by the Vira I. Heinz Foundation. Lynn curates the Pittsburgh Poetry Calendar and has an online presence at http://lynnwagner.pbwiki.com/