Count the Waves: Poems
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Beasley uses humor and surprise like a scythe, cutting to the root of a matter.”—Washington Post
In Count the Waves, Sandra Beasley turns her eclectic imagination to the heart's pursuits. A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."
Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer."
Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The best pages of Beasley's latest work call back to the ingenuous and whip-smart mix found in her wave-making 2010 collection, I Was the Jukebox. The poet and memoirist (Don't Kill the Birthday Girl) produces quotable phrases ("You're always an hour away from where you said you'd be"), mines science for quips ("400 million years in, ammonites wonder what more they can do"), and looks outside the self for graver subjects, as in a scary poem about a subway crash: "If a metro car comes behind another/ and mounts it,// that first squeal sounds/ almost like/ joy." This third work of poetry might seem more like a transition than triumph: some of the poems are based on a 19th-century collection of phrases, The Traveler's Vade Mecum, and seem willed and scattered, neither easy nor challenging; no clear emotional arc holds the volume together. Yet there are still many reasons to expect success: most of Beasley's aphorisms, and most of her sestinas (of which there are six total) end up as strong, as serious, and as much fun as ever, and the ones with the clearest stories also end with the strongest zing: "What a man hungers to love// makes him a bear. What he bears makes him king."
