How Many Hands to Home
Mayapple Press
73 pages, $20.95
The poems in “How Many Hands to Home,” by Berkshire poet Lisken Van Pelt Dus, come in a very welcoming, uplifting, and resounding variety of styles and forms that keep the reader’s eye alert and eager. The subject of a poem requires a particular form, and Van Pelt Dus is entirely up to what it takes in every case. After wading just a few poems into this lovely pool of work, the unmistakable warmth of her voice and her compassion settles the mind into the overall light of her vision. You will be drawn in completely. There is something new here in every piece. She sees things we probably never saw in quite the same way, and even as we may recognize these things in our own lives, as with all great poetry, we are grateful for her illumination. This is what great poetry is all about.
This focus of form is exemplary in the poem “Home: a Cadralor” (in Section IV of the five sections in this book) where the last line, “and then I’d measure how many hands to home,” captures the spirit of this collection. The phrase emerges from the poet’s fond memory of her grandfather’s globe of the world that would spin in its stand, and when randomly “stopped where my finger landed,” she had focus points anywhere in the world from which she could travel the globe back to her home. In the cadralor form, this home is where the poet yearns. She skillfully takes us to the heart of this poem’s form and—fittingly, since this is the title of the collection—in many ways to the heart of all the work in the book: poet as reference point to the world, both internationally and personally.
According to the co-creators and the editors of Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, Lori Howe and Christopher Cadra, the cadralor consists of five highly visual, unrelated, short stanzas. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, “illuminating the gleaming thread that runs through all the stanzas and bringing them together into a love poem.” By love, they mean that the fifth stanzaic image answers the question: “For what do you yearn?”
Poems that reflect finding the center represent the experience of the poet having been all over the world, affected by world politics and formed by community and family through love. In the poem “Ghazal: Home,” Van Pelt Dus has eye-opening lines that tell of being a citizen of the world:
‘Where are you from?’ is an easy question for my husband.
I have to pick an age, a year, before I can name a home.
This authority through life experience empowers the poet to make statements with real power and resounding resolve in lines like this further on in the poem:
Floods, bombings, earthquakes, inability to work-
Across the world 150 million people have no home.
England taught me to hear class, America to see it.
Either way, Lisken, unpack. Make yourself home.
In Section III, the poem “Waiting in Line at Immigration” makes a clear enough point and makes us pause, though in questioning this time. Why is a family with small children apparently detained while others, such as the poet, somehow make it through the line to enter while “one family several lanes over has been / fingerprinted and photographed, / has been standing at their kiosk forever”? The poet’s only answer comes in the final two lines:
Now you are here. X marks the spot.
This land is your land. They said so.
We can identify with her liberating relief at the acceptance of place and feel the deep compassion for those who are seemingly subject to a more arbitrary disenfranchisement.
Every poem in this collection does the same because art is meant to help us question things based on what we see, what we care about. The wide variety of forms and subjects come back to the personal point of view regarding personal relationships, places, and learned experience on many levels. The poems in this beautiful book are strong, original, and transforming in how the poet has done the work of her art so that we can read with fresh appreciation about being somebody in place and time, as the couplet in the poem “The Universe Considers Loss” puts it:
Come, we’ll share the heavy lifting
Of grasping so much of so little.
Lisken Van Pelt Dus will have a reading for “How Many Hands to Home” on Sunday, February 23, 4 p.m., at The Bookstore, 11 Housatonic Street, Lenox. Drinks will be available from the Get Lit Wine Bar.
