Polina & the Pomegranate by Kathryn Kimball

Myth has it that Persephone had to go back to hell each year because she ate its seeds. Rich in the succulent and dark, Polina & the Pomegranate is sensuous, precise, grievous, textured, joyous. These poems of discovery and desire yield by mid-volume to explorations of deeper understanding, such as the poem about the simple miracle of waking to a new day after yet another night in which “we have not reeled off / into the void.” The poems at volume end ponder the quality of death. “Dead, whatever it means,” muses one, “has never meant / love is no more.” The volume’s exquisite final figure is of the “orchestrator of my life,” who will “close my eyes . . . when I’ve seen my last / of you, my love.” The strength of this volume lies in its steady faith in the goodness of life and death. “If seduction is all we have of knowable splendor,” concludes one poem, “then here I am, World.” Indeed, world, here is an all-embracing poet, Kathryn Kimball.

–Robert Ready, author of Eck: A Romance (2021); former dean of the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Drew University.

Kimball’s poems crack open spaces where secrets reside but refuse to fully reveal themselves, and their hermetic magic is the gift of this collection. Moving back and forward in time—whether inside plague year 1348, or a contemporary surgical theater lighting a galaxy within the fimbriae of a woman’s womb—Kimball provides elemental guidance. She seems to know how time itself tastes and smells: her pine, salt, honey, waterways, and wind-funnels hold lyric heat steadfast as Pastan’s. Among Kimball’s anchor portraits are a lover whose hair was “spider silk,” and a city vibrating with thousands of winter radiators, steaming and tuned to the so-called 432 Hz “miracle tone.” This book offers many after-effects: I’ve carried a single poem, then another and another, like the man who tells of the earthquake “which entered his body/and has never left it.”

–Judith Vollmer. Vollmer’s sixth, and most recent book of poetry, is THE SOUND BOAT: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press 2022)