Hyacinth for the Soul, Joan I. Siegel, Deerbrook Editions 2009, $16.95
“We knew who we were back then,” begins Joan I. Siegel’s Hyacinth for the Soul—and I found myself sitting beside her on the stoop, “snug” in my “square-toed socks.” Siegel, professor emeritus at SUNY/Orange, offers a collection of sensual, compassionate, and highly individual poems. “As though darkness were a hand, / a tactile memory / like playing the piano. You touch lost things.” These lost things include childish fears (“black holes that could vacuum us / up like a pair of socks.”), joys (“you and your sister… comfortable as animals in each other’s smell,”) and puzzles (“How the veins / of the lamb on your plate looked / just like the veins in your wrist.”)
The details of everyday life filtered through memory become mysterious. Her father, “dark as rain on black umbrellas” in a photo taken before her birth, will later ask his wife, “Who are you?” In these lovely poems, Siegel meditates on her experiences and thus allows us to see ourselves.
Lee Gould, The Chronogram.
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