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.
