After a full day at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, immersed in poetry from many different voices, I turned to my friend Yenna Yi’s recently published book, one of three poetry collections. Her poems draw on her background as a psychotherapist to celebrate life’s joys and cope with its blows.
She’s also the author of Ring of Fire, a memoir of 14 years living on a catamaran with her husband and two sons sailing the globe. One of the poems in this book recalls that time. “The Stormy Sky” begins:
I remember the days in 1985 . . .
Waking up dancing on the liquid fire
Of gale force wind in the Tasman Sea,
The home of wind—wet, wild,
Lost in the valley of waves,We held onto the halyards
Of the jittering canvases . . .
In another poem, “In the Stealth of Darkness” she tells us: “I’m haunted and besieged / By life’s gifts and punishments.” Yet she finds solace in poetry, the words “forging their way/ Into my heart like a river / Through stone.”
In other poems she examines the uses of memory and the restorative powers of nature. She explains the title in her author’s note, which says in part:
. . . I call my early childhood unvarnished—roughhewn between [the] aftermath of WWII, Korean War, poverty, family separation and loss . . .
However, I find beauty in unvarnished life—turning a shed into a home, making a dress out of rag and drift wood into art . . .
With these poems she delves into the experiences of a lifetime, finding that “A blemished bowl wants to be mended, / A healed scar adds another layer of skin.”
What poems are you turning to as the days draw in and the nights linger?