Book Review: The Slow Creaking of Planets and Meditations on Rising and Falling

by Gretchen Primack and Philip Pardi

by Lee Gould, July 28, 2008

Some poets write with an urgency to show us a moment from ordinary life that would otherwise disappear. Gretchen Primack and Philip Pardi, visiting faculty at Bard College and authors of notable first books, are two such poets. A grocery store cleaning woman “reaches / over to fill her hand / with a shower of gold dried/apricots.” (Primack); “the man / buying beer at 8 a.m. /
all smiles.” (Pardi)

Primack’s chapbook The Slow Creaking of Planets begins by introducing Doris, one of the poet’s alter-egos, yearning for “an aviary of calling birds/the color of apples and oranges/Tonight, under the pitted planets.”

Interestingly, these alter-egos have animal as well as human qualities. What they share is an intensity for life, even as life ends. “Midnight,” the collection’s last poem, witnesses the death of a “mixed Briquet Griffin Vendeen,” who, like Doris, yearns toward the stars. “But that was the night she gave over / to space, let the pulley of notes raise her as far / as she could go, and stayed…” while Orion “slipped out of the bowl, / leaving only his glittering belt unbuckled.”

Primack’s vision is of connectedness in an attentive universe: “Wasn’t grief stuffed / into the marrow / of each trunk? But wasn’t the trunk sugared in joy?” Although often playful, the work can be edgy; the color Chartreuse becomes “A squint. A pint of over-frozen. / Contracted glands. A squirt.” Primack’s rich poems often surprise.