All the While.

All the While

Catherine Abbey Hodges

New Women's Voices Series, No. 42

P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky 40324

1599241013 $12.00 www.finishinglinepress.com

"Safe," the opening poem in Catherine Hodges' first collection, All the While, is wonderfully, sensuously evocative of childhood. On another level, the poem describes the developing awareness of a writer. First comes the child's noticing, with senses wide open: the smell of coffee, and "the breakfast-making clatter" which means she is safe; the discovery of a "rust-colored and furred" bat in a loquat tree, a "breathing fact" which will "alarm and thrill" her. Then comes the child's creation of a private language, the poet's infatuation with words, and the delicious recording of the secret code in a book made of her mother's onion skin paper.

The language in these poems is unpretentious, unselfconscious, childlike but elegant too, and accurate. "Stems" begins "Lately I catch myself / less interested in / flowers / than in what precedes them." The stems are "hilariously furred," "durable as doves." They are

   drinking straws,
   submerged in the molten earth
   delivering answers
   that look for all the world
   like cornflowers.

The poems, written by someone who is "the first and last speaker of / a snatch of language / without a name," are a reminder to take in the world as a child does, as if for the first time.

I can look at the book another way : All the While can be read as a kind of writer's memoir. "On the Equator" tells about a more grown up writer than the one in "Safe," but still the child, fascinated by the beauty of the physical world, is present in the poem, a boy who "has been netting golden / carp." The speaker says,

   This year we live on the equator.
   At times I think it runs straight
   through me. This could explain the ripping,

   as if I were a piece of cloth, torn
   quickly down my length by
   business-like hands, the sudden

   loud unzipping of my story about the world.

The frustration of the writer-observer who is always missing something is expressed _ the first line of "Everything Important," is "happens behind my back." "Water lilies open, then close./ Nations are born. Friends up and leave/ their sturdy bodies."

And from yet another perspective, the book can be seen, as authors John and Muriel Ridland say, on the book's back cover, as a collection of botanical paintings. "The Possibilities of Blue" combines careful observation with the power of the apt metaphor contrasting the agapanthus, which have yet to bloom into blue,

   and all the while
   the Matilija poppies
   lie white on their shrubberies,
   lacquered Japanese bowls, petal-thin,
   trembling with the published secret
   of the lemon planets they cradle.

"Easy" gives us Hodges' painting of a jacaranda tree beginning to lose its blossoms, "the inexplicit purple shawl about the lovely old neck, / easy on the grassy shoulders," and lets us become the beholder, "who sees all in a rush" that the tree letting go is "truer" than the tree's earlier "bright fanfare,"

   though neither is false
   and easy is anything but cheap.

Hodges' poems give that all-important illusion of having come to the page easily, naturally, perhaps because there is so much close attention to nature in them, and so much humanity.