Poets tend to prefer one elemental force over all others. Some, like Sylvia Plath, for example, are all about fire. Matthea Harvey’s obsession is water. Nearly every poem in her newest collection, If the Tabloids Are True, What Are You? (Graywolf Press, $25), mentions water in some way. The book opens with a taxonomy of mermaids, from the Impatient Mermaid to the Objectified Mermaid. (“The Straightforward Mermaid has already said to five sailors, ‘Look, I don’t think this is going to work,’ before sinking like a sullen stone.”) A poem about a global-warming-inspired flood, “When the Water Is at Our Ankles,” finds everything going wrong:
When the water is at our shoulders, the officials will
roll out the boulders and we’ll throw our bonsais in
the river to simulate that underground forest they said
might help—a miniature, misplaced effort, it’s true
Harvey even displays an alchemist’s gift for transmuting one element to another; her long poem “Inside the Glass Factory” is about a woman who confronts a Plath-like inferno…
Matthea Harvey reads tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Chihuly Garden and Glass. Click here for more info!