Asterisms by Donna Kane (Harbour Publishing 2024)

At the close of my review of Donna Kane’s last collection, I wrote: “The honed lyrics in Orrery (2020) feel mostly like genuine, real, human movements of awe and listening in the face of space and death and biology and time. And this, as a pursuit, constitutes the necessary core of poetry.” This claim remains true and even more powerfully so throughout her new book, Asterisms. “I combed/ the darkness for what I might find” is a line from one of her poems that could serve as a praxis for the entire vision. Kane is writing at the true peak of lyric intensity here, her ear honed, her curiosity about everything from the Artemis program to frogs to the Incredible Hulk evidenced in pieces that explore depths in small spaces of language and feeling. The prefatory poem is rhymed and features a repeating line you sense came to Kane in the middle of the night: “Knowledge is the fruiting body of light” and that she trusted the sounds and wrote it down, then let it lead her further in to its own sonorous wisdom. She’s not afraid of making pure statements that could be deemed too simple, when they are actually plumbings of what it means to be fully alive. Lines such as those that begin the poem “Wayfinder” : “I just want to be happy./I like the springtime sounds of wood frogs/I think an earthworm’s five hearts are sweet./I don’t like to think of the world as bloodied.” She knows the “red in tooth and claw” of nature but, more vitally, she wants to maintain awe and wonder towards the world, as this is the nexus of being truly human.

Kane sometimes gets cutesy with her imagery as when she envisions the ladybug folding “each wing like a napkin” (Perennial) or a bit too nursery-chimey in the last poem that repeats, “The elephant or the shrew/the me or the you,” (Love Poem for Every Animal on Earth) but these slippages are rare. Asterisms, even in its tiniest pieces, is sleekly stirring, as with the best poems by Charles Wright or H.D., philosophical musings meeting the most precise gaze and the tautest lyricism. I loved the sonnet “Nonda Creek Alpine” with its final haunting stanza: “Surely, breath’s rhythm is the heart of want –/in and then out, in and then out.” Also Pigs (“I was surprised to learn pigs have the capacity to dream”), all the meditative “On” pieces but especially “On Memory” with its “nectar in an uncapped cell,” the tangible frustrations of being a person expressed in the poem, “Perched as I Feel, between Inner and Outer” who must navigate the “pebbled topographies/of avocados” and who can’t even open a plastic bag easily but desires to see her “four-chambered heart,” Kane’s admission that she dreads “the end of beauty” and so harvests early (Beauty), and her awareness of the mysteries aging brings in Jetlag (“Age is a place we learn from brochures/or hearsay”). And O! the short piece that one could re-read a thousand times called “Morning Thoughts of Death While Watching a Horse Cross a Snowy Field.” Also, the acknowledgement of scientific failings in experiments on the horseshoe crab, the melancholic questionings of “Winter Solstice” (“My shadow grew so long I could see where I was going before I arrived”) and then the humorous hissing-out of an inflatable snowman in “New Year’s Party” where “Frosty’s a spent condom.” The tones and forms are varied and balanced in Asterisms as Kane asks poignantly, “Are we well?” Knowing the answer is no. Celebrating what is left of the yes anyway.