Andrea Potos writes on the remembrance of things past
When I was a child, my favorite annual activity was to spend a week, sometimes two, being spoiled by my paternal grandmother. She lived in Shreveport, some 325 miles from my home in New Orleans, and part of the thrill of that week was to travel there or back on an airplane by myself. Another kind of thrill was accompanying her as she drove around town in her 1940 Ford, which inevitably broke down somewhere you’d wish it hadn’t.
“Stay in the car with the window cracked,” she’d say, as I watched her go knocking on doors until she found a telephone she could use. We’d wait until rescued by a cousin or one of my uncles-in-law. Once we rode in a tow truck.
Perhaps my most vivid memory is of Saturday afternoons, when she would sit in her rocker and prepare her Sunday School lesson for the next day. She had a small black-leather binder, where she would write out her lesson in unbelievably small script. She taught a ladies Sunday School class well into her 80s; sometimes she’d also practice her singing or piano solo for the worship service. She was self-taught in music; she couldn’t read a single note.
Those scenes with my grandmother, inevitably rose-colored by time and memory, came to mind as I read The Presence of One Word: Poems by Andrea Potos. I’d enjoyed her previous poetry collection, Two Emilys, and was looking forward to this new one. What I didn’t expect was to be taken on a journey into my own childhood.
This collection might be subtitled “Remembrance of Things Past.” Potos writes about her grandmother’s big black landline telephone (my grandmother had one, too, and on a party line). Then there’s her grandmother’s dresser, which “seemed to reign / over one half of a wall.” She recalls traveling to her grandparents’ home in Greece, a visit that included making Greek meatballs, hearing stories about her mother and aunts, and introducing her own child to her grandmother.
That sense of memory pervades the poems even when she returns to writing about her life in the American Midwest. She finds the quickest way to the community pool in the summer. She relishes the icy winter. And she offers a late apology (a very late apology) for crushing that June bug.
Late Apology
50 years later
to the gleaming fat June bug
I scrunched
under my small bare foot
on my way to the Ferris wheel
across the street from my house.
I can still see the smooth black shine
of your armor that failed you
just as I landed.
Oh creature of obsidian summer—
forgive me—I only had eyes for the twinkling
lights that twirled in the dusky nearness
while the moon, ascending,
must have eyed us
from its angle of neutral clarity.
Potos goes on to write about sitting beside her father in the hospital ICU (I’ve been in that exact same position). She describes a typical phone call from her mother, and going back to the old neighborhood 30 years later (I’ve made a similar pilgrimage). She mourns a friend’s passing and wonders about eternity, which I’ve come to understand as memory pitched forward. And she includes dreams, trips to England and Ireland, and the lists she makes.
Andrea Potos
Is it any wonder than poems like these take you into your own “memory palace” of real and imagined things?
Potos is the author of numerous poetry collections. Her poems have been featured in a considerable number of print and online literary publications, and three of her books have received Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. She’s also received the William Stafford Prize in Poetry from Rosebud Magazine and the James Heart Poetry Prize from North American Review. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
And that one word whose presence gives the title to the collection? It’s “jacaranda,” a tree that grows in her daughter’s yard across the country, a symbol of how the art of memory inhabits all generations. The Presence of One Word is one of those poetic treasures you want to read again and again.
Related:
Photo by Sylvia Sassen, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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