Renaming the Seasons by Judy Kaber

Poet Judy Kaber has written these poems of intimacy, despair, and grief as a compelling tribute to her friend and fellow poet Karie Friedman. The sixteen poems—heartfelt and evocative—take us from Friedman’s gardens, to the terrible fall on her brick walk, to the hospital bed, and to the ensuing grief. The fall—“you plummeted to the brick walk”—at first seems only “an inconvenience,” but the truth becomes clear all too quickly. “Hope glazed/our faces, a brittle sheen” Kaber writes after visiting her friend in the hospital.

At Friedman’s house after her death Kaber notes the “onions,” “dilly beans,” and “crumbs,” all remnants of the living poet, now gone. In “A Brief Elegy” she begins with a line I love because it describes the intimacy shared by poets: “I grieve the loss of a witness/of small things.” I miss Friedman for the same reason; a fellow poet is no longer with us. Kaber is an inventive and original wordsmith. Ringing in my ears are “wet smack of cloth against metal” and the haunting “It’s you I am seeing/in owl’s call, in willow bark, in seeds.” Read these poems and enjoy the music and the layers.
–Thomas R. Moore has published three books of poems: The Bolt Cutters (Fort Hemlock Press, 2010), Chet Sawing (Fort Hemlock Press, 2012), and Saving Nails (Moon Pie Press, 2016). His poem “How We Built Our House” which was awarded a 2017 Pushcart Prize. He served as Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, from 2016-2018 and lives with his wife, Leslie, an artist and writer, in Belfast, Maine.

Renaming the Seasons, by Judy Kaber is a beautifully crafted, deeply moving tribute to poet Karie Friedman, whose life and poetry has been an inspiration to this reader as well. Kaber’s poems also appeal to universal themes. They examine the complexities of friendship and loss, and they celebrate the beauty of the natural and everyday world. In her poem “A Scant Amount of Time” Kaber writes, “your garden plants among purslane / and pigweed, your flowers thick with quackgrass /and ragweed. Garlic sprawls across / your counters, your bed remains unmade.” Here in Kaber’s poem lies the unraveling of what we have cultivated as we fade from the world, and yet the poem’s rich language brings our friend back to us.
–Lori Desrosiers, has two poetry collections, “The Philosopher’s Daughter” (2013) and “Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak”(2016) both from Salmon Poetry. She has a chapbook, “Inner Sky” (Glass Lyre Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications. She earned her MFA in 2008 from New England College. She mentors privately and teaches poetry in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at Lesley University M.F.A. program. Her website is http://loridesrosierspoetry.com.

Judy Kaber’s Renaming the Seasons gifts the reader with an honest picture of grief and how it accompanies us through the process of learning a new world created by an absence —in this case, that of a beloved poet friend. The idea of how a world is diminished when “a witness / of small things” is gone is a powerful one, and upon finishing the collection, it is truly those powerful small images that remain with like “a sheet of ice cut to lace” and “a mouse escaping burning brush.” But more than anything else, these poems leave me with a sense of celebration that exists alongside the sorrow, and I came away with such appreciation for Kaber for taking us on this journey, to have seen how it’s also possible to have “picked up the poems that were / scattered everywhere” when the poet who writes them is gone, how “we drink your tea / and taste the heather of you there.” And though this is a specific grief, this collection has done the important work of opening a reader up to a greater understanding of losses already experienced and losses yet to come.
–Jennifer Finstrom is an instructor in the First-Year Writing Program and the Honors Program at DePaul University, as well as the Outreach Coordinator for DePaul’s University Center for Writing-based Learning (UCWbL). Her poetry has appeared in several places, most recently in Ides: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks and the Nancy Drew Anthology from Silver Birch Press, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and NEAT. She is also the poetry editor for
Eclectica Magazine, one of the oldest continuously publishing online literary journals.