by Peter Mladinic

In the poem “I Go Back, as I Am Today,” from Suzanne Cleary’s latest collection The Odds, Mr. Winslow, a teacher in an eighth grade classroom, wonders aloud if he should have read his students the E.A. Robinson poem “Richard Corey,” as it reflects the recent death of one of their classmates; like the man in Robinson’s poem, the classmate, William, died by his own hand. Mr. Winslow, his back to the class, wonders if he did the right thing or the wrong thing. The buses that will take his students home are yellow, like the “long hedge aflare with forsythia” out the window, while Cleary’s speaker sees “for the first time the bravery / . . . of displaying doubt to others.” The irony lies in the poet’s certainty: If there is any doubt, as surely as there must be, in these poems written by a woman alone in a room with language, it is all behind the scenes. The presentations on the page are rendered in a voice of certainty; like the forsythia, they are unmutable, and memorable. Cleary’s attentiveness to people, places, and things gives her poems access to the metaphorical resonance beneath the surface.

Thing-oriented poems involve the speaker’s discovering and placing her findings in an epistemological context. “Worry Stone” begins with a stone in a pocket, and ends with a boulder, encircled by small stones, near a house in the country. The speaker wonders which came first, the house or the boulder. She pictures a woman in the house, and finally the boulder flying over the roof, leaving the woman unharmed (beating the odds). The epistemological link between the stone and the boulder is forged by the imagination. Similarly, in “Lovespoon,” the spoon’s carved “hearts and doves and bells” are linked “with cables and braids and knots” stitched into “Aran / sweaters knit to protect the sailor / from cold” and “to identify the body washed ashore.” Gloves, artificial wings, a bumper sticker, a mural, a poem by Robert Bly, and an Emily Dickinson poem are among other objects Cleary includes. One entity of nature that appears is Dan, an endearing bulldog; another, which has no name, is a large snake that appears in a hot, dry dusty place, near a water trough. The speaker saw the snake daily

from her attic studio, the snake 
           sunning itself on the top of the stone wall,

all near-six-feet of it shining like black oil,
            like a slice of midnight come early 

               then gone, woven back into summer’s grasses.

When the speaker discovers that the snake has been raiding her hen house, she gets it into a thick sack, places it on her truck’s floorboard, drives to a mountain’s edge, and releases it into the wild, thus relinquishing, in this instance, 

the beauty that sometimes one sees
         and sometimes disappears for weeks,

invisible, though it spread itself long and shining
             in clear sight, hungry.

There is great variety in the places in these poems: an emergency room, classrooms, art galleries, studios, a park, an opera house, a college campus, a CVS drugstore, a virtual Zoom, winding roads, neighborhoods, and basement stacks in The New York Public Library serve as stages for narratives to unfold and be resolved. In “Bumper Sticker,” a stretch of road is described in images that lend credence to the book’s title, The Odds. Anna, the minister’s wife does not want her faith displayed on a bumper sticker. Driving the road her daughter drove when her daughter had an accident, she lives her faith. Fortunately, Anna’s daughter, Julia, survived the accident. As best she can, the speaker explains the odds:

No one is safe on that road built when cars were small and slow,

when trees now crowding the shoulder, their limbs overhanging, 
were saplings, planted not by gardeners but by wind carrying seeds
through the air and dropping them. We understand some things:

the air drops a seed, a bird eats the seed, the bird flies away,
The bird shits out the seed, which takes root. A tree grows.
A car hits the tree. The car is totaled. The girl lives, or not.

Just as the poems are particularized in form, content, and thematic concerns, so are the people. In “Emergency Room,” the book’s first poem, the speaker evokes empathy for her fellow-patients: “the construction worker holding his side / and the woman with long brown hair holding a baby.” In “Life Class” art students look at the model but do not start to draw or paint until they’ve left the model’s presence, because of “The first lesson: to see.” In “Baseball” a grandfather’s imagination conjures for himself and his grandsons the inner life of the beloved sport. Suzanne Cleary goes to the inner life in all of the poems in this collection, rendering a panorama of exacting images that emphatically evoke the joy of living—and that often underscore the idea that poetry is more about questions than answers. The Odds, in short, is one really good book. Poets and non-poets alike would do well to read it.