I’m a big fan of Kathleen Norris. Her prose is eloquent and challenging. Her poetry, on the other hand, isn’t what I’d hoped. I read Little Girls in Church last year and loved it. But when I picked it up again this year, I got a little bored. I wanted the poems to be more dynamic, more surprising, more interesting in terms of language and metaphor. I wish she’d pushed some of them a bit further and taken more chances. Like I said, I really liked it last year, and I think other Norris fans should read Little Girls to get a flavor for her poetry, since she primarily calls herself a poet. This go-around, I wasn’t impressed.
Side note: This book includes one of my absolute favorite poems, “Kitchen Trinity,” which contains that most lovely line about stirring the stars. Read it for yourself:
Three women
at a table
hold the world.
One gets up
to stir the stars,
one makes the fire,
another blows on it
to keep it going;
and still they have time for play,
three women
hunched over a cup,
hands open in invitation
as the table tilts
in Rublev’s icon,
three angels
with the same face.
My mother is the tree trunk I climb,
my grandmother’s hands
kneading bread
make the table shake.
Tell me the story
of three hungry angels
who appeared one day at Abraham’s tent,
to make Sarah work
and laugh.