Between “madness and magic” lies a middle ground, a gentle pause that arises from gaining perspective, as accomplished poet Laurie Kuntz illustrates in her new poetry chapbook titled Balance (Moonstone Press).
In the above quoted poem, “Between,” she shows us how the spaces in the middle matter:
If our lives were lived in a straight line
like holding ends of a jump rope–
one turner madness, the other magic,
we would learn to rise in rhythm
with each arc of the rope and all that happens
in a moment of becoming airborne.
Between the landing and next jump
are the daily interactions that prove us human
The author makes a case for the beauty in the details of everyday life, all the more cherished for its temporality and fragility. A number of the poems focus on her long-term marriage and mortality. In “Options,” the opening poem, she writes “we can no longer waste / the time that stretches between us.” Then, in “While My Husband Forgets Our Anniversary,” she proves that by holding back a complaint. At the end of the poem, he calls her in to taste the tomato sauce he has been cooking all day: “Don’t burn your tongue he says, as I lift / the spoon to my lips, and tell him it is perfect.”
“Have You Seen?” is an amusing poem about losing things around the house as we age. The narrator tells us she doesn’t see the items her husband is looking for. Then the poem takes this moving turn:
what I do see
are your hands that lack all that is missing
these ghostly images you once held
in an earnest effort to recharge, to mend, to protect,
and to share with me all that is lost.
In “Elegy For the Face in the Mirror” she “mourn[s]s for whom I no longer / see.” Yet she also connects it to other losses– “loss of someone who once cupped my face / into welcoming hands.” Acceptance prevails as she observes that “today her face has softened / into a frown of forgiveness.”
There is celebration here too, as in this snapshot of an eleven-year-old boy, young enough to dance without self-consciousness. In “Dancing With the Stars,” Kuntz captures his natural joy in these lines:
moving to music like a sparrow
moves to the wind carrying
its long winded chirp up to the stars.
In other poems like “Possibilities While Driving Through The Lincoln Tunnel,” the author lets her imagination run away with all that could go wrong like “dogs loose in the dark.” It becomes a stand in for all the risks of living today and the randomness of what can go wrong.
Looking out further at the dangers of the world, Kuntz doesn’t flinch and ignore them. We go on a journey through war-torn places, both places she knows herself and places that we all watch now. She has worked in refugee camps in Southeast Asia earlier in her life and you sense that this has affected her deeply.
She writes achingly about a boy in Vietnam who dreams about uniting with his green-eyed American father in “Homecoming” and about a woman who is losing her eyesight, in “Cambodian Vision.” Even after the woman moves to California, certain sounds haunt her, bringing back memories of earlier horrors. Perhaps proximity to such suffering has contributed to Kuntz’s appreciation of life. She sees what we can be lost in a disaster, whether natural or man-made.
There is delicious defiance in poems like “I’m Done With,” which operates like a manifesto for resisting the endless striving of younger years. She writes:
I’m done with
not eating the bread
nor spreading the butter
And later,
I’m done with fallacy of spring
and the rush to nowhere.
The final poem, revealing a new grandchild, is titled “What to Call Grandma.” Instead of worrying about what she will be called by the child, she cuts to the bone: “When that child calls out / for Grandma to come… / it is not the name that matters, but the calling.”
In Kuntz’s hands, balance becomes perspective, counterbalance and the balancing act of holding all of life’s contradictions at once. As she aptly writes in the poem “Balance,”
We need that balance
to embrace an endless summer state of mind
while dancing in the eye of the storm.
One of the tasks of the poet is to direct our attention to what might be missed. In “On the Brink,” the author knows that she “live(s) on a brink / brink of storm, brink of heartache, brink of all that breaks.” We all have these points in our lives where change is around the corner. Sometimes we sense it, anticipate it, fear it. Other times we find it too overwhelming to think about. Kuntz shows us the value of facing life courageously calling out what we all know to be true. There is comfort in truth, and beauty.
