Lessons in Space

"For all the toughness, asperity, gall in her exacting inspection of those circumstances we find so hard to make out--adolescence, marriage, love, la condition feminine--there is an abiding sweetness in Cathleen Calbert's poems, honey at the heart or at some other center. Her poems are like pomes, indeed, delectable within the rind, but guarded, sly."--Richard Howard "Once again, a bad year for the skies. Ice on the wings. Terrorist activities. The shuttle shooting stars, a white blossoming, newscasters suddenly speaking of the face of God in the face of such large and instant beauty, saying, surely that medley of men and women has vaporized into angels. But on the beach, a burned helmet, bone sliver from a slender foot. Back in Houston, people explain things. Just miscalculation, not God calling them up with powerful love. But an error. Technical. Human. Sufficient." --from the poem "Lessons in Space" Cathleen Calbert's poems are like sudden blooms in provisional, temporary spaces--a suburban childhood, an unhappy family, the thwarted freedom of adolescence, dead-end jobs, cafes, buses, trains, and rented rooms in foreign countries with restless boyfriends--all places where another life (her real life) is dimly felt to be just around the corner. These, however, are only the poems' settings. For her subject, Calbert takes the vivid, saving, small details--the taste of things, the feel of things, their color. Through the details Calbert lifts, floating above the places she would rather not be, beyond the grasp of people she would rather not be with. A crack in a blue cup, the egg's "white holding white, holding a yellow ball," a "dream of blackberry," "the sweet dirt of the peach and apricot trees"--these are Calbert's "Lessons in Space," transformed, through the details, from lessons in waiting to lessons of hope. Cathleen Calbert's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, 1995, Paris Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, New Republic, Ohio Review, Hudson Review, The Nation, and in 1994 she received the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.