Reviewed by Alexis David
Tiny Extravaganzas
by Diane Mehta
Arrowsmith Press
October 2023, Paperback, 136 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8987924112
I first heard of Diane Mehta through The New Yorker Poetry podcast. This podcast asks poets published in The New Yorker to pick a poet they like, to read that poet’s poem and then to read their own poem. In this way, the listener gets this lovely dance between the two poems, sometimes, like in this case, years apart. I listened to Mehta read the Irish poet, Eavan Boland’s “The Lost Art of Letter Writing.” Then Mehta read her own poem, “Landscape with Double Bow.”
After reading Mehta’s Tiny Extravaganzas, her choice of Boland’s poem is fitting. Like many of Boland’s poems, it is about writers who have left their country behind. Boland writes, “And if we say / An art is lost when it no longer knows / How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see / The way we lost it.” Mehta’s book of poems feels like a sorrow that wants art and music to speak its truth. In the poem, “The Mad Pursuit” Mehta writes of music and death, “Still unravished in my mind, my songs are unrefined, / unquiet, for quiet I will be once thought disappears from me, / cuts short brief bliss and all my soundscapes with it–” (28). Here, death is the moment when thought leaves a body. This poem goes on to speak of brutal histories of humankind: “The evermore invaders raped so fast / the women broke in half, and men were clawed to shreds or gutted / in the Coliseum” (29). The poem ends with the speaker yelling: “I sit by the shore and yell.” (29). Yelling is a strange kind of music–a vocalization of anger, frustration, and not believing the world is capable of such brutality.
I found myself first reading Mehta’s poems on a sunny, hot, false summer October day and listening to my neighbor’s music that swirled up and over my fence and into my yard. It was strange music–ghostly. This was the perfect place to read Mehta’s work, as her poetry is filled with a musical lexicon. Other strange things started to happen to me as I read Mehta’s book throughout the autumn of 2023. For instance, I began to notice the sound of insects in my backyard and the gentle chiming of my six month old daughter grasping a hanging chime. Mehta’s poems started to teach me to listen. Many of the poems are musical–they pay attention to sound, but they also attend to the spaces in between sound: that powerful silence that (to me) only poetry and music can harness so well. Additionally, music attends to time–it punctuates silence with notes to create rhythm; Mehta’s work also does this.
In reading Mehta’s book of poems, I am questioning what a review should do? Should it try to make meaning from it–giving readers an understanding of what these poems mean to say? As if poems are puzzles that need to be decoded and figured out? Or, should it highlight some particularly good moments in language? Should it connect this text to other texts?
Or, rather, should it, as Mehta writes in “She Realizes the Object of Worship is Herself,” “look out / from inside a painting, and then look in from out.” (26). There seems to be a delicate interaction that happens between poem and reader. The space where we look out from inside a poem and then look in from out. This is a fermented space between a poem and its reader that I want to investigate: that deep soil, dark and warm, like melted chocolate where the poem exists in the reader’s self: in her paratext.
This is a book of poems about art and music making. Mehta writes in “Pot-Pourri à Vaisseau, from Sèvres:”
Art is love modeled in experience
fired at higher temperatures than experience.
Beauty elucidates what you hand-work in your heart;
making art is just that next and next experience of showing up (22).
Here, Mehta uses a pottery metaphor, experience being a type of clay that one fires in the kiln of art. Art is a means of making meaning from experience, sometimes difficult experiences, like grief and aging, as in “There Was a Place,” “The lake is warmer than the world is cold, / time is better when you consume the decades of growing old / ferociously” (13). In many of Mehta’s poems (especially “Plum Cake” (4)) there seems to be tremors of grief, of the sadness of life–of both observing death and also of the feeling of getting older. The sensation that time is a type of God that has the final say on our existence. And maybe, that’s why Mehta is so drawn to music and time.
In The New Yorker podcast, Mehta reads “Landscape with Double Bow” and she also reads it in a conversation with M.P. Carver. I have listened to this poem a few times, but it was only sitting in my office, in the silence that comes with taking a break from watching my young daughter, to the other-wordly sensation this poem brings. In it, she describes a musician she is hanging out with at a residency in Italy. The musician is chasing “ghost tones.” They are, from my understanding, a sensation so low that it is barely audible. Mehta writes, “oh, wouldn’t it be grand to be a whole-note / dragged across the bridge of your singular, sound-expanding / double-bow, to be orchestral, to be drunk, to drink the velvet sun” (43). There is a longing here– also present in some of Mehta’s poems–a longing for a sensory experience of actually being music, of being the sound that is played across her companion’s cello. This experience would be similar to being drunk, to drinking the sun. How beautiful. How absolutely stunning to write a book of poems that becomes the sound we layer over silence. Mehta has written an entire book of ekphrastic poetry that becomes both an instruction manual on how to appreciate art and music, but it also becomes music itself, “staccato and legato, legato and staccato” (43). She ends “Landscape with Double Bow” with the death of grapes, “We jammed the grapes inside a bowl, / so plentiful, and ate their tiny hearts at lunch” (44). Here, both an act of nourishment and an act of death for the tiny grape’s spirits, of being in sun-filled Italy, of writing poetry which calls attention to the ghost tones of our lives: aging, sadness, grief, and yet, ferociously living: making and appreciating art because it feeds us, forms us, because it is time fired in a kiln, it is our moments turned into music. In Tiny Extravaganzas, Mehta dances on the line between poetry and music, between sound and silence.
About the reviewer: Alexis David is a poet and fiction writer who holds a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, an M.Ed from Canisius College and an MFA from New England College. Dancing Girl Press published her chapbook The Names of Animals I Have Loved. Additionally, she has placed reviews of poetry for Tupelo Quarterly, North of Oxford, Compulsive Reader and The Masters Review. Links to her other published work can be found here: https://alexisldavid.wixsite.com/alexis.