[REVIEW] Her Last Cup of Light, by Annmarie O’Connell

31 pages, $14

Review by Lauren Gordon

AnnMarie O’Connell’s chapbook Her Last Cup of Light is an ode to the south side of Chicago. Her voice is rooted in the spirit of the neighborhood and she traverses the landscape with her young son, while contemplating the birth of another son. The poems are lyrical vignettes that home in on the people in the city, from mechanics to shut-ins. A thin motif of nature emerges and almost becomes supernatural against the urban sprawl, which lends to strange ecstasy. Even the titles of the poems are meant to be read as first lines, as if the poems occur in a rushed breath.

Anxiety is the engine powering the poetry, but in that same rushed breath, O’Connell is also offering a reader something surprising – hope. There is a dead serious hopefulness in humanity that is wrought through deceptively simple language and imagery. A good example of this is in the poem “The Man Who Lives in the Abandoned Garage”:

touches the baby’s cheek with his dirtiest hand.
With the other, he gives him a handful of grass.

The baby brings a single green-yellow blade to his lips.
The rest slip through his little fingers.

Listen to the music in the last two lines, where the internal rhyme is as subtle as the alliterations. The effect of concrete imagery and end-stopped lines is that they lend authenticity to the poet’s voice. Hopefulness is presented throughout the book as juxtaposition, how darkness touches light, or becomes it, or through the physical bodies themselves. Despite the current of hope that runs throughout the book, this isn’t an awe-struck poet. Clearly this is an experienced voice who can break down the space between shared human experiences and we see that in poems like “I Met a Man Who Does Not See” and “A Shaft of Sunlight Enters the Earth,” and particularly in “I Bring 73 Year Old Mary Food” where O’Connell writes:

I want to bring her something simple to change her life,
not Fair Share bags of food she won’t even eat.
All I have left to offer today is news:
a single Bleeding Heart grows effortlessly alone
in her backyard garden.

The narrator of these poems is one who offers hope through truth, not just to seventy-three-year-old Mary, but to the reader. These characters exist in the speaker’s world and despite the lack of physical descriptions, they are easy to access. Suddenly we are there with Mary, listening to “her lungs rattle the room” and the recounting of “her 6 out-of-state children.” When Mary says “my son is dead”, the reader becomes the breath being held. Even the symbolism of the lone “bleeding heart” flower is finely and simply crafted.

The city is always hovering in the background of these poems. The poet’s empathic lens enables a reader to inhabit the poems and walk around in them in a way that is safe. However, despite the accessibility and intimacy in these works, it would be fair to say that these are also poems of longing occurring through the denouement of grief. “When the Cashier Unexpectedly Asks You” is a prime example:

You want to tell him
that at the exact moment of death,
we’re navigating
in weeds.

The physical body of humanity casts out its echo and hears a voice bounce back as reassurance that we are not alone – not even in death. “The baby asleep beside me will exist/after I have fallen off the earth,” O’Connell writes. There is longevity and faith, but not a longing for permanence. The poems in this book don’t attempt to alter their landscape; rather they tend to it. Her Last Cup of Light walks through an ephemeral space, one with bulldozing trains and shrieking babies, waitresses and veterans. O’Connell manages to offer buoyancy from within the concrete walls. You don’t have to be a south-sider to appreciate that.

***

Lauren Gordon is the author of Meaningful Fingers (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and Keen (horse less press, 2014) and a Contributing Editor to Radius Lit.