Into The Woods: Michael Magee reviews Lana Hechtman Ayers' OVERTURES

Overtures, poems by Lana Hechtman Ayers

A Review by Michael Magee

If you look down into the corner on the cover of Lana Ayer's latest book, you will see her peeking out into nature through a window we can also see into. Loss—including the natural world, personal and self-inflicted pain—is a major theme in her new collection of poems, Overtures. But there is also joy, as in “Balm,” in which she writes “Purple ink flows from the tip of my tongue.” Her poetic tendrils reach out into the world trying to find a handhold or foothold for her own poetic nature.

Lana Ayers' Overtures combines her personal history with a sense of wonder and irony, invoking her own muses and a sense of self-discovery. “Limitless” is the title of Section 1, but it is also rooted in the everyday and sounds her credo. “Plums” is a good opener, full of colors and close observation and a refusal to sentimentalize or trivialize the everyday.

but the plum’s cold stone heart meant
that I refuse to sentimentalize—
toss it into the weeds behind the house.

She engages in a kind of cryptography—decoding modern enigmas in “To All the Website Developers Who Want to Help Me with Driving Traffic to My Site”—a heavily ironic critique of the worlds of data bases, bitcoins, and, as she claims, a “cryptocurrency of the human heart.”

This collection of poems provides an answer to why we must keep writing.

“If Only” is a coda for our existence and extinction in which she imagines herself in a smoky aftermath of dead batteries and, citing a “blameless oven,” perhaps an echo of Auschwitz. There is a poignant, bitter-sweet quality, a gentleness, a sadness as the cello strings vibrate / Truth is agony, sounds a variation on Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

Section 2’s “Of Time” gets darker (as Leonard Cohen would say). She imagines a day that never comes when “we will all be out of time.” Many poems are about Covid and quarantine as she cites a quotidian laundry list of what we all desperately hang onto. Best of all, however, in “Metrophobia (The Fear of Poetry),” she talks of how poetry saved her:

And despite my fears, my aversion
to my own poems, I keep on with verse,
respiring lines, lungful by lungful
in order to connect with all of you,
dear readers, my words with your eyes,
my breath safely with your sacred breaths.

This is communion poetry which addresses the “us” without just blaming “them.” Her tone is reminiscent of Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre. “Reader, I married him.” Lana has a way of invoking us, asking more, not less. And that, dear reader, is a place to begin, not end.

NOT THE END OF POETRY

After Ada Limon's “The End of Poetry”

Shower me with susurrus and hummingbirds,
with cherry blossoms and Steller's Jays,
with acorn and pine needle, leaves and roots,
more impasto, more of still and perhaps
more witty librarians and awake and a moment's
grace, more of flesh and ache, desire and divine
remembering, and the heavens and ice floes,
sorrow, more of everything the pain is like and not
like, how someone's absence changes the light,
more of the pledges and denials, more studying
the sky and searching one's heart, more of the flare,
the flash, a best friend's death, and the letter she
left for you in a shoebox, more of the hunger
and craving, the self-doubt and all of suffering, more
of lost childhoods, grandmothers and grandfathers,
more considering the world, curious and passionate,
more of the difficult to look at without looking away,
more please listen, I am here, more we are in this
together, more of your voice mingling with mine, more
nights, stars, moons, gratitude and its gifts, more joy,
I am asking you to write more poems.

Lana's poetry asks us not to sweep life under the rug, but, instead, provides this advice to the self in “Broom Woman.” This is the picture Lana fits into on the cover, into the woods.

BROOM WOMAN

I sweep summer sand
across the floor,
out the door
just as a dragonfly,
inky green,
attempts to enter,
darts away—
curses!
I am a woman
with a too efficient
broom.

Overtures is full of personal conviction and anecdotal evidence from the world, a laundry list of endings and beginnings. To use Lana's imagery, it is cleaning house! It's like coming home and hanging up your coat to find the pockets are stuffed with crumbs and the napkins you've been writing on each day, and wondering, “Where has the time gone.” This collection of 125 pages of poems provides an answer to why we must keep writing. 

Michael Magee's latest collection, Terra Firma, Sacred Ground, Poems 1970-2022, was recently published by MoonPath Press. Michael published Self Variations: Travels in Greece and Turkey and the coloring book The Penny Princess in 2022. He lived in Nottingham, England, and has read at Shakespeare and Company in Paris; on BBC Radio 1; and won a first prize in the Dancing Poetry Contest in San Francisco. His travels have taken him to Austria, the Czech Republic, Morocco, Turkey, and Malta. This autumn he is travelling to Budapest. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.

Overtures, poems
by Lana Hechtman Ayers

ISBN 978-1-6398033-7-8

Kelsay Press,
https://kelsaybooks.com/products/overtures

2023, paperback, 125 Pages, $23.00

(Cover art: Vue de la fenetre [Window in the Country] by Marc Chagall)

Author’s photo by Andrew E. Ayers