A Little Want -- Latter Days of Eve: Beverly Burch

 Leave Me a Little Want by Beverly Burch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars        25 May 2023 as “Poetic Expressions” in The Berkeley Times, “Knox Book Beat.” 

Beverly Burch’s A Little Want was mostly very good, but her Latter Days of Eve was definitely excellent, and won awards like the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry to prove it. 

        I have been wondering a lot about women and men, boys and girls; about love, desire, power and control. (like for 55 years or more?) She is a Berkeley psychotherapist (you have my sympathy), and I felt she unsheathed my tough, coarse, protective, snakelike skin as I read her wonderful poems. (“Difficult” mothers and religious upbringings are hard “crosses to bear.”)       

A few of my quotes and notes: “I went after words” -- “Riddle” (with no question marks?) What, Who, Whose? -- Autobiographical scent, sensory. – “Rumors of the Old Somewhere.” Yes! – “three lovers one week,/ I felt neither shame nor doubt” –

“Age comes like a scourge: red hot with renunciation.” -- (Wow!) -- “Schoolmarms embraced me/ like madonnas. Little favor here, kind words there.” -- 

        “I want to fill you up, little chink in the heart.” Mothering poems and the Stormy Sonnet and “An Incantation for a Hard Rain.”

So right, so RIGHT! Brava! Bravo!

Leave Me A Little Want, Beverly Burch, 2022, Terrapin Books, West Caldwell, NJ.
Latter Days of Eve, Beverly Burch, 2019 , BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City.


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