Cyanometer by Faith Paulsen
$14.99
Faith Paulsen vividly captures the intimacies, secrets, and sorrows between beloved family members and friends. In the midst of losses, wonder and compassion abound: a hummingbird is a “trick of the eye” that evokes the speaker’s mother sipping tea as it “savor[s] rosewater” in a “call to prayer.” In a meditation on a wondrous invention designed to measure every shade of sky, a voice urges, “Make my body an instrument to measure the blues.” A mother who transforms her grown son’s bedroom into an office lingers in memory and longing until “Missing him / is the dervish bell she whirls in. / Missing him is its own language.” Even as her poems lament “Losses [that] swim away / like minnow / as we try to count them,” Paulsen’s contemplative poems resonate deeply with love and the vibrancy of life.
–Dilruba Ahmed, author of Bring Now the Angels
Opening with a pastoral awhirl in whooshing and lush specific detail, Cyanometer grounds readers firmly in the now and gives us poems of presence and attention. We move from now to past, from intimate family moments to times of historical import. A collection so seamlessly organized, I urge readers to read from beginning to end at least once—no skipping around. Poem follows poem on a music-drenched journey from the present to the past and back, from a poignant moment of imagining the future minus a dying mother, to a childhood memory of watching that same mother pin up her hair with its scent of Breck shampoo. The choice to turn a grown son’s bedroom into an office becomes a haunting meditation on what it means to miss, or be missing, a study of absence that is its own kind of presence. In Ode to a Fossil, Paulsen brings us an outlook,/ layer on layer/on layer,/a deposition of sediment//mudstone, siltstone, redwall. This is the vista of Cyanometer—a deposition of layers of memory, observation, and, ultimately, well-earned wisdom.
–Liz Abrams-Morley, Author of Beholder
Arthur Turfa –
Faith Paulsen’s third chapbook touches on several topics, but the one that speaks to me most is family. The poet does not emphasize family; there are other themes. For whatever reason, that is what resonsates the most with me at this time.
The title comes from an 18th Century scientific device for measuring the blueness of the sky. Regardless of the actual shade of blue, it is still the sky. Paulsen looks at the nuances with repect to people, places, and objects.
A good example is found in “Mother in Law”. She wanted to be known to the poet as “Mom”, but a variety of other names appears by which the older woman was known: “Umbrella in Sunshine” “Three Phone Calls a Day”. There are nanes given to the poet herself. Over time the poet finds herself sliding into the role of an older woman in the family herself. There is neither shock nor horror here, but rather the awareness. Readers can do what they wish with it.
The poem describing the cyanometer, while not exactly a title poem , nevertheless establishes the framework for Paulsen. After naming different shades of blues, mentioning a disparate group of people, she states her desire to “make my body an instrument to measure the blues”. (The poem is entitled “In 1789, a scientist invented.”.
“My Brother and I Shared a Bathroom” has a tone that is gentle and reflective as years of memories are compressed into 31 lines, as the siblings “,,,rattled like commuter trains/ from dollhouses to Legos and bac.”
Other poems deal with a father’s piano, a son teaching overseas, and a mother continue the theme of family. Never maudlin, the poet looks at the nuances in her perceptions of long ago and the present,
The remaining poems provide opportunities for nuances. Senior citizens discuss a John Ashberry poem, the Marianas Trench receives a letter, and other people are mentioned. “Cyanometer” is a book of poems that will delight readers as they read and reread the variety of poems found in it.
Arthur Turfa, “Saluda Reflections,” Finishing Line Press 2017. “The Botleys of Beaumount County”, Blurb,