In Like the Sun in Storm, a poetry collection, Ralph Salisbury uses relatively simple language to conjure images that are anything but. The title poem was one of my favorite in the collection. I’m still so wrapped up in the clean description of a child’s hiding place and the safety and hope embodied therein that I can’t translate the extraordinary feeling to the page. Instead, I’ll share two other favorite excerpts.

Enmity in “End of a War”

“The widows, who’d prayed we’d be shapes
burned into brick by a weapon broken into myth
saw us as skeletons
garbed in their husbands’ flesh” – Ralph Salisbury

This poem takes place in Nagasaki at the end of World War II. It recalls people who were vaporized by the atom bombs we dropped on Japan—leaving only shadows of their existence “burned into brick.” There are so many ways Salisbury could have talked about the horror of war. He could have described the effects of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or he could have written about the confusion in Pearl Harbor as the Japanese bombed us.

Instead, this first-person, boots on the ground account of how the survivors reacted to his band of soldiers conveys both individual torment and a sense of mutual responsibility. I felt revulsion at the damage done by a weapon we created, but Salisbury also raised my guard with the enmity in those widows’ eyes. They were out to destroy us too.

The concrete imagery of the body in this passage evokes the human cost of war. It also allows the more ephemeral phrase, “weapon broken into myth” to stand apart. Well after I first read this poem, I was still thinking about the aura of myth around the atom bomb—how it creates almost Biblical destruction and how we talk about it so casually.

The poem as a whole creates a very personal and a very complex view of war—one I will be thinking about for a long time to come.

Family Meets Technology in “Awakened by Cell Phone”

“I hear the lovely and loving chatter
my daughter’s year old daughter sends
through silicon crystals
transmitted into eons of green
metamorphosed into petroleum
reborn as plastic, and, yes, into the centuries
of families which formed my ear.” – Ralph Salisbury

Here again Salisbury plays two sentiments against one another. He begins with the warm intimacy of family—the uncomplicated love of a grandparent for a grandchild. Then he makes a surprising segue to a thoughtful deconstruction of this wondrous technology that binds us. Though the language here is a bit more flowery than in the previous poem, the images are equally straightforward. My favorite part about this passage is how he returns to the human connection at the end.

I am not a poet, but even I could appreciate Salisbury’s carefully constructed language. The book overall spans World War II and familial love as you’ve seen here. It also speaks to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, being Cherokee in Amish country, and the more complex sides of family relationships. It’s worth reading this book to understand how these diverse topics coalesce under the mastery of one voice.

I’m planning to re-read Like the Sun in Storm to learn about line breaks from Salisbury as I consider writing some poetry of my own. I’ll also enjoy (and learn from) the layers of nuanced emotion he creates on the page.

What poets do you read and what have you learned from them?

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

Two of the most powerful sentences Paley wrote in the title story of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute follow one another back to back: “He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear and down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.”

If Paley had not used the plumber’s snake analogy, the path of words “through the ear and down the throat, halfway to my heart” could be sweet or seductive or slippery, but the image of the plumber’s snake gives at once a wheedling and an invasive implication. I can see a man casually unrolling the long metal snake, maybe he’s smoking a cigarette. The snake goes farther and farther in, working toward her heart against her wishes and scraping the sides of the canal, and if it is one of the snakes with a claw at the end, doing further damage along the way.

If the next image were him reeling it back in, then I would think of all the filth along the length of the snake, but no, he leaves it in, clogging the canal and leaving his job memorably half-finished. Then there is the sexual connotation of the words “snake” and “equipment,” where the narrator is figuratively left full of the unwanted genitalia he unraveled inside her. Paley is showing how he got to the narrator, past her better judgment and then left her “choking” on the fact that he let him get to her again.

Faith in the Afternoon

In “Faith in the Afternoon,” Paley presents another sentence packed with meaning: “Faith really is an American and she was raised up like everyone else to the true assumption of happiness.” The “assumption of happiness” explains the uniquely American viewpoint Faith holds that we are entitled to a good life and that good things happen to good people. But assumption also has the connotation of rising to heaven in living form.

Paley is equating living in America with living in heaven which offers a stark contrast to Faith’s grandparents’ lives in Eastern Europe and the hell of the holocaust from which they fled. In a few simple words, Paley embodies the ideological differences that separate the generations.

Again in “Faith in the Afternoon,” we meet Bugsy. About her dereliction after meeting Ricardo and becoming a whore, Paley writes: “[s]he soon gave up spreading for the usual rewards, which are an evening’s companionship and a weekend of late breakfasts.” Bugsy would simply be a tragic figure if it weren’t for her place in the relationship as the former lover of Faith’s first husband.

Because of what happened to Bugsy, we see the potential ruin of Faith by her relationship with Ricardo. But in Faith’s attitude toward sex, we also see that she is getting paid though not with money and we start to wonder whether Faith escaped from her relationship with Ricardo as unscathed as we would like to think.

I love that Paley can say so much with so few words. The language she uses is always appropriate to the characters, but the words’ rich connotations imply worldliness. I love to use a good image when I can find one, and I hope I can imbue one with as many luscious possibilities as Paley does.

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