The Radiant

Now that I've run into Cynthia Huntington's poetry after so many years of trying to rebuild my own shattered life, I recognize a sister. Huntington's bravely personal poetry brings me as close as probably possible to identifying with another person. Huntington's poetry is honest, beautiful, and intimately scary.

I bought The Radiant several years ago when I took a workshop with Cynthia Huntington. Then the book sat on my shelf of unread poetry for a long time until it was just what I wanted to try at that moment. Do you choose books like that, too? I must have fifty books of poetry waiting for the right moment. Anyway, I'm so glad The Radiant finally pushed itself forward into my life. This is a very brave collection. Ms. Huntington writes about her multiple sclerosis and the betrayal by a lover in ways that cut to the bone. The emotions are raw but the execution is exquisite. I particularly love her curse poems: "Go that way not this way./Do not go where I am going. Do not walk/the way I walk. Where I am walking/is away from you." Brava.

I read poems to get a buzz--a surge, a belly-shudder. Mostly I'm disappointed, but I'll read a thousand ok poems to get to One that Works. The Radiant is full of buzz-poems. Huntington's voice is as pure as Mary Oliver's, and urgent, also, like James Wright's. But more importantly, the poems in The Radiant entertain: they are pleasurable--they zing. In The Radiant, Huntington writes about her battles with Multiple Sclerosis, her broken marriage, and sea-swirled Provincetown. In her poem, "The Rapture," she writes about the moment she was first seized by MS: "I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup, / and in that moment, I became another person." There--that is her voice throughout The Radiant: pure, intimate, compelling: she begins with the every-day and ends with the extraordinary. Later, in the same poem, she writes about her first MS attack, describing it as "a bolt driven down my skull into my spine." Such unflinching honesty characterizes all the poems in The Radiant. Huntington's four Curse poems will be the most talked about poems in the book. Two of the curses are directed toward her friend (now her ex-friend) who slept with her husband; two are directed toward her adulterous husband (now her ex-husband). In "Curse One: The Wraith," Huntington calls her former friend "a small shape of death crouched among leaves." In "Curse Two: The Naming," Huntington curses this woman again, savagely, but also with some (dark) humor:I want to throw stones at her mother's corpse,send her children to name-change foster homes.May the coat she is wearing burst into flamesand boil the flesh blistering off her bones.May she be refused in both heaven and helland wander the earth forever without rest--a hungry ghost clinging to the rocks and trees.The curses transform a contemporary human affairs into a Biblical, even mythological, event. But forget all that: read the excerpt outloud--feel the energy, the surge! You'll not find such words in the Hallmark aisles or on your Grandmother's fridge. The Curse poems are wickedly delightful poems. They are brutal. They are masterful. They will endure. The Curse poems are the Big Hits of The Radiant, and the poems about MS are compelling, also, but the poems about Other Topics--nature, history and mythology--are no less skillful and imaginative. Consider the beginning to "Hades":God made the dogperpetually hungry,yearning after a handout,a dug up bone, a tasteof meat or bread,but without senseto ever stop eating. . . .This is clear-eyed poetry--straight-forward and wise. In "The Strange Insect," Huntington focuses her gaze on just what the title suggests--an odd, unidentified bug. She calls it "the wickedest jeweled queen" and describes it "drumming small / horny feet in a cadence, beginning to speak. . . ." She takes a Little Thing, and by examining it in the light of her imagination, discovers its mystery, its Vastness. Eventually, however, it's the voice of the poet which makes her poems compelling or forgettable, and Huntington's voice is pure and passionate; it is her voice which makes The Radiant so good. Here is an excerpt from "Vale," one of the poems in her "On the Atlantic" series: The world is where we die. Let's climb the mountain and make a fire there out of wood that grows with its roots in the black cold water. Let's climb the rocks, go up alone. In the valley they sleep with their heads on stones. Mice gnaw the fisherman's nets for salt and the fish swim through. The people sleep with their heads on stones, and angels come down on ladders, bearing messages. They carry the page help open to our names: let's not be there when they come.Huntington doesn't have to resort to fancy tricks or literary allusion or political commentary to make her poems work; her voice is enough. These are simple words: "fire," "roots,""mice," "salt," "ladders"--these are things of this world made radiant.