Book review

Sapphire examines ugly truths in poems

A Possible Explanation — Poems by Peggy Sapphire; 56 pages; published by Partisan Press in 2006

Reviewed by Tena Starr

Peggy Sapphire’s first collection of poetry is a blunt, wide-eyed examination of some fairly ugly truths — people don’t always die with dignity; poverty, injustice and cruelty are still with us; and what happens in the name of love isn’t always loving.

A Possible Explanation contains 31 poems, and there’s nothing sentimental about them.  Many, such as “The Presence of Justice,” are overtly political.  Others are about family, lovers, childhood friends, and “The Art Of Making An Omelette,” a deeply satisfying and sensory poem that speaks to much with great efficiency.

At the moment his Liederkranz cheese reached

consummate ripeness on our kitchen counter,

almost liquid with two weeks’ pungency,

my immigrant father, no stranger to making do,

searched the ice box for omelette ingredients.

Liederkranz was a landsmann bearing accent,

a handshake and tears to his eyes, was

brazen with stink only to those who did not

     know better.

So...yes...the ice box. There he found a solitary 

     green pepper,

an abandoned onion, two serviceable potatoes

     and four fine eggs.

As the Teuton he was, my father diced the

     potatoes into

one-quarter inch cubes with the same surgery

     he applied to

his weekly wages, then cut similarly sized

     squares of

onion and pepper. He sauteed all and began

coaxing the edges of the four beaten eggs

as they bubbled in butter in the cast iron skillet.

Bach or Beethoven or Brahms gave grace to our  

     little feast.

We dined at the table I set, he and I, giant

     golden

omelette halves

for each, the Liederkranz centered on a saucer

     between us

its tin-foiled paper peeled back like petals.

We slathered it on, I as apprentice learning to

     smear it

across my slices of rye, to take big bites.

He poured the wine. Red.

Talk began. The politics of war and money,

     union organizing;

Franco, Jew haters, the KKK and dead friends.

“Now I can tell you why I ran,” he said.  “I ran

     for my life,

my working man’s life, my immigrant life, my

learning English life, my ‘brother can you spare

     a dime’ life,

my love Paul Robeson life, my Free The

     Rosenbergs life.

Now I can tell you how I sang the anthems of

Pete Seeger, The Weavers and Josh White.

Ms. Sapphire, who lives in Craftsbury, was born in Brooklyn, New York.  She’s a retired educator and counselor.  She’s also a political activist and a woman whose compassion, as well as her obvious repugnance toward injustice and bigotry, informs much of this slender book. Her poetry reflects a deep concern for working people, the downtrodden, the abused and the maligned, as in “Not Yet.” 

I miss you tonight

someone’s talking about

her day to day

of bills she can’t pay   unless

she shorts her landlord

or her kids’ dinner plates

how she sings the anthem

of this land to her kids

but the words don’t speak of poverty

for their floor-mopping father

don’t speak of faint wages

for their janitor mother

don’t speak    In new language

the fears of getting sick

then sicker

The poems in this book are also something of a family album, vibrant snapshots, some affectionate, some less so.  It’s meaty writing, with subject matter that leaves the reader with something to ponder.  Ms. Sapphire also writes insightfully about death, as in “In The Midst of Dying.”

Kindness is what she needs

in the midst of dying

not my regrets reminding her

of what remains undone unsaid

of intimate misunderstandings

I surrender instead applauding that she

still combs the newspaper

as faithfully as others pray

seeking signs of the

Workers’ Revolution.

She makes her daily bed

between chest-heaving collapses

pays her bills to protect

her perfect credit even as

she waits to hear CT scan results

revealing whether there’s enough

of her left to warrant

replacing the car,

after all, she still needs

to get around.

Ms. Sapphire’s poems have previously appeared in Blue Collar Review, Connecticut River Review,Maryland Poetry Review, Jewish Currents, Flipside, and in anthologies. 

The book is published by Partisan Press, a nonprofit publisher in Virginia.  “Our mission is the preservation, expansion, and promotion of the literature of our working class, primarily poetry, which might not find a place in profit-driven publishing channels,” the publisher says at the start of the book.