Linda Stern: Why We Go By Twos
Call it a guest blog. I’m delighted to share with you a wonderfully personal capsule review on Facebook by Janice D. Soderling of the book Why We Go By Twos by the poet Linda Stern, who happens to be my spouse. A Swedish-American poet and woman of letters, Soderling read the book as part of The Sealey Challenge, which prompts participants to read 31 poetry books or chapbooks of one’s choice in the month of August.
Here are Soderling’s comments on Stern’s book.
It is a challenge to choose which poetry collection to comment on, to offer my friends as a daily recommendation: a jubilation or a broken heart, or both and more?
Linda Stern
In truth I do not choose, I am chosen. Today, I knew I was chosen as soon as the shelf yielded to my hand Linda Stern’s Why We Go By Twos (published by Barefoot Muse, i.e. Anna M. Evans ).
On different days we read the same poem differently. Today, watching pain rising like smoke from a blue planet polluted by chemicals and unholy revenge, words—all words, also these—have a different patina than six years ago when Linda handed me this book at a cafe breakfast in New York City. A gift from a gifted poet. Below are some memorable quotations from the book.
. . .
never imagining youth would not last
that everywhere some river flows swiftly,
grey and deep, to a treacherous grey sea.
“Oregon”
. . .
Just then it did swoop, all damnation
on the wing. Oblivious passers-by
clung to their familiar lives.
“Hawk”
. . .
They watched the ship recede atop the waves,
clutching their infants in the rising flood.
knowing they were not chosen to be saved.
“Why We Go By Twos”
. . .
Janice D. Soderling
It is a strange thing, language. Words are colored by our subconscious and by memory, by the moment that is and by conscious history.
The next morning Linda and David kindly gathered me into their taxi to get us to (I think) Grand Central Terminal where we were required to walk past many human bodies littering the concrete in order to get inside the station and take an antiquated train to Poetry-by-the-Sea, but that's another story.
. . .
So too the child who's jumping rope,
the bearer of a human heart,
feels what it is to stop and start
and knows that doubt's the only hope.
“The Power of Doubt”
Thank you, Linda and David, for books, for conversation, for your kindness.