Book review: The Carrying, Ada Limon (2018)

This spectacular collection of poetry oozes sophistication and raw talent like some ravishingly decadent cake that is steeped in honey and garnished with lashings of dark chocolate.

I zipped through the book in a short hour or so, clenching my jaws to bite back guffaws of appreciation and sensing the hairs rise on the back of my neck as some of the poems worked on my central nervous system like a forgotten memory that you retrieve from its niche in your brain when you get into a lift and you smell the perfume of a previous occupant still lingering in the air inside it.

This work is exciting stuff. Words are given freshness by being granted the force of their original meanings once again. The poems are not long and they keep you interested in what they talk about for their entire length before delivering the punchline with a smack. The report that results from reading the final line in each poem is usually considerable, and this burden is paradoxically carried effortlessly across the barriers to your consciousness, serving to form an exclamation point to emphasise the meaning belonging to the whole.

At the heart of the book (the title alludes to this) is a problem conceiving children despite years of trying. So the writer produces this stunning poetry instead. At one point one of her avatars in the book says she describes things “to be useful” and there’s a deadpan and unsentimental core here that reminds you of the fundamental decency behind the American experiment, despite all the signs saying something to the contrary.

Some items that stood out for me were ‘Full gallop’, a poem about a dream, which is very successful. Less successful though still good is ‘An new national anthem’, which interrogates the nationalism that lies within the hearts of all her fellow countrymen and -women.

‘Mastering’, about a woman who cannot make children, is sublime and has the trademark kick at the end like the one a horse gives just before galloping off with your emotions clinging to its back. Horses feature in this collection and the poet spends part of her year in Kentucky. In this particular poem you are told a story and the ideas develop, sway as though a truck has just passed close enough to them so that they reflect the displaced air moving around them, and coalesce in the final line like an image that snaps into focus in the beam of a portable projector shining its light on the wall in front of you.

It’s not often that you find a poet as assured and confident as Limon. This is a truly original voice and it belongs to probably one of the best poets working in the world today.

The voice belongs to someone who is grounded by a realisation that valuable truths often lie hidden in the simplest experiences, like the sight of two birds sitting on a branch, or in seeing the deciduous trees in her neighbourhood turn green in spring, or taking pleasure from growing things in the earth, and deriving satisfaction from looking after the cats of a friend who has died. Birds and horses and stories the author’s father told her when she was a child: particular things that belong as memories to one person but that, written down as verses, all of a sudden assume a universal significance so that they belong to everyone.