Waiting for Beethoven.

Waiting for Beethoven

Laurel Yourke

Marsh River Editions

M233 Marsh Road, Marshfield, WI 54449

ISBN 0971890978 $8.00 45 pages

In Waiting for Beethoven, Laurel Yourke composes poems about music, about rooms, about writing, poems written about sonatas, little love songs filled with the magic that is part, no matter how difficult, of the world she weaves. There are no barriers in these poems. "Everyone is welcome at this party." All the reader needs is here:

   Don't bother searching under the mat,
   behind a bush or somewhere you can't reach.
   You need not push--just lean.
   This door is always open.

   "The Rooms of Poetry" 3

While the title poem suggests the narrator waits for the storm of Beethoven's music to create within her a sure rapture, the rapture for the reader comes from opening the poems' doors, entrances (and exits) to rooms in which it is sometimes too painful to stay. In "Walls and Closets," the narrator plasters her walls thick to create a barricade from what she fears: "The more she fears the wild / the thicker she plasters her walls." Yet in other poems, the narrator confronts the "wild" and enters its dangerous spaces only to find that in entering, there is deliverance, a release from fear not unlike Gretel who goes into the woods to pursue her own magic: "Hope drives her deeper into the forest, / searching for a talisman all her own."

The doors to the poems' rooms open to reveal a yellow school bus which discharges two, angst-ridden teens, a cat hungry for spring and suspended in a canoe high in a garage, and even a woman who searches for a moon that seems to have gone impossibly missing. There are minnows and frozen ponds, Casey Stengel and St. Brendan, and the sweet memory of a Jewish girl's wish for of a gift of Christmas from Macy's Santa when she finds what she seeks: "The real gift / is her mother's smile."

Many poems in this collection address gardening and writing, both of which--like opening a door--might be considered acts of faith.

   Follow your heart, which can bring you
   petals in snowflakes,
   bird of paradise plumes of sunset,
   acres of carelessly sown star.

   "Green Things" 10

Even the act of tending the garden takes on sensuality: "Like a lover / the garden whispers / how good / a touch / would feel here / and oh here."

In carefully crafted metaphors, Yourke creates poems filled with light and memory and sometimes loss. These are poems about fathers and mothers and others who occupy the narrator's rooms, halls, closets, imaginary letters, and even empty glass bottles. The narrator addresses the "empty bottle [that] guards her kitchen table" and considers the need "to stay ever vigilant" with evil as she considers the "dangers you create yourself." "He's taught her all she knows of light, bottles, / emptiness." In another poem the narrator pictures letters filled with praise that she never received from him. In another, she imagines him sleeping downstairs on a sofa. Yourke chooses words that contribute to a distinct tone: words of danger: "sunlight stabs her kitchen" and "sky's half-streaked with blood" and "a sun pale and bitter." In spite of the risk inherent in her word choices, there is always something hopeful--like the clear decanter, empty save for the light that enters it.

Light is present in these poems; it enters abundantly, leaks into the most unexpected places, as in the chess game where the boy considers that he's been trapped by the master, and to get out his snare and win, he must understand that: /"You can take all the joy from it / or get all the joy from it. Simple." /And it is simple, really. In these poems, Yourke's narrators' room are open, the doors are always open. To these small songs, she brings "her insides out," no fancy dresses and no artifice. No matter how difficult, there is always the chance of light from an improbable moon, the possibility of blossom and of music to carry her to ecstasy.