Travelers on My Route
Travelers On My Route by Carolyn Raphael, Kelsay Books, $20.00
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Always the soft staccato of the cane/ tapping the code of injury or age
As I write this review it is that fantastical time known as the holiday season, that brief window of weeks at the end of the year which contains a few scattered days of celebration and other days that are just useful excuses for rest and recuperation. As so many of us spend these days with family, this can also be a good time to reflect on where we are in the life cycle. We may look out at dinner at aging parents, competitive siblings, loving partners, and screaming children and wonder how we got here and what could be next. These are the kinds of questions Carolyn Raphael sets out to explore in her new collection of poems, Travelers on My Route.
This is a book about life in all its wonder, from infancy to the grave. In one poem Raphael describes a child covered “with chocolate pudding/forehead to chin” and in another she attends a birthday celebration for a deceased friend, “each guest puts on a coal-black party hat,/ and no one knows the right way to behave.” She unflinchingly charts the life cycle in its entirety with moments of loveliness and of pain. And in poems like “A Calendar of Trees” she reaches outside of herself to find peace and wisdom in nature, “buds swell, then leaflets rise in spring,/ slowly unfurl their lacy leaves/ until they form a crimson dome.”
She does this with a variety of techniques. In her formal poems, she proves herself adept at the sonnet, the villanelle, and the rondeau. In formal poems and others, she often uses rhyme and meter. “The stage is placed near maple, oak, and pine—/ white bows set out to celebrate the way./ A trellised arch weaves berries and grapevine;/ the flag is raised for a performance day” she writes to set the stage for her poem “Wedding Day”. Perhaps what I admired most about the collection was Raphael’s ability to use poetic forms to deftly portray emotions. For instance, her use of repetition in a villanelle to reflect a tour guide’s growing annoyance. Some of the other poems in this collection were too moralistic for me. I wish Raphael had spent more time wrestling with the major questions instead of trying to quickly answer them. But the humor sprinkled throughout the book goes a long way towards fixing this.
There are two important ideas that I will take away from Travelers on My Route. The first is the meaning of survival. In the poem “Turquoise Anita on the Dancefloor” she chronicles the life of a woman on the move from Estonia to Finland to Germany to Poland and then back to Germany during World War II. Raphael describes the hunger, cold, devastation, violence, exhaustion, and cruelty of those years but also the pain that came in the years after. Throughout the book we see people living hard lives and somehow enduring. An endurance inherent to the human story.
The second idea is how essential art can be to our lives. Raphael describes the transformative power of a painting, an opera, a dance, and of course, a piece of literature. The human experience is one of hardscrabble survival but it can also contain landscapes of pure joy. This is something we would all do well to keep in mind as we begin a new year and I am grateful to the poet for reminding me.
Benjamin Schmitt
Benjamin Schmitt is the author of four books, most recently The Saints of Capitalism and Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The Good Men Project, Hobart, Columbia Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he has also written articles for The Seattle Times and At The Inkwell. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.