Red Kimono, Yellow Barn by
David Hassler
" David Hassler's poems create a calm, clean
swept space in the mind and heart. Even when they're about distances
and
longing, the early loss of a beloved mother, the multiple, many-flavored
worlds layered along the horizons, there's a perfect shaping of
scene, an exquisite stillness and tender gentility in these poems.
I love them. "
Naomi Shihab Nye
"The early death of the poet's mother
is the source for many of the poems in Red Kimono, Yellow Barn ,
but, as the title suggests, the engine that drives them is an exuberant
embrace of the physical world. Hassler writes about food, clothing,
bricks and mortar, flowers, and the rituals of daily life (both Eastern
and Western) with affection and precision. He also writes extraordinarily
well about work: teaching children, washing dishes, making sandwiches,
repairing an old barn. Even the work of grief becomes physical
labor: “I want to crawl / under the engine of my heart / and tighten
nuts and bolts.” In a mature narrative voice, this welcome
book “chops
wood; carries water.”
Maggie Anderson
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David Hassler is the Program and Outreach
Director for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University,
where he teaches and conducts writing workshops in local schools and senior
centers. He is the author of Sabishi: Poems from Japan and
a forthcoming documentary book, Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant
Community . He is co-editor of Learning by Heart: Contemporary
American Poetry about School, A Place to Grow: Voices and Images
of Urban Gardeners, and the forthcoming anthology, After the
Bell: Contemporary American Prose about School. He has received
an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council and
the Richard Devine Memorial Award for Poetry. His poems and essays
have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sun, DoubleTake/Points
of Entry, Indiana Review, and other journals. He lives
in Kent, Ohio with his wife, Lynn, and daughter, Ella.
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excerpts
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O-bon
In sweltering August, on the last night
of o-bon, three day festival for
the dead,
I arrive in the village of Komagome.
Families sit out at night on their front
porches,
drinking tea or sake and
tasting sweets,
wearing cotton robes they slip into
after bathing—bright,
loose yukatas.
Doors left wide; orange paper lanterns
flicker to light the way, the dead
are invited to return to their homes,
tables set with their favorite foods
and flowers, instruments and books laid
out
that they might want to use again.
On the first day the families went to meet
the souls of the dead at
the water's edge,
and tonight they will accompany them back.
Everyone
is gathered in a small park,
the ground neatly raked. Lanterns hang
from trees and around a small wooden
stage,
where women in kimonos dance slowly in a circle
to the music of drum and
flute.
Downtown, one summer, my mother and I danced
the polka on a bandstand
at the corner
of Main and Water. We galloped
and spun as I held her hand, feeling the back
of the nylon dress she had
sewn, white
with a little red and blue in it somewhere.
Here, the women lift their arms,
appearing
only slightly from sleeves, where
plum blossoms and cranes drop softly away.
They turn their hands like fans
and dance alone.
If I could I would find my mother's dress,
pick a bouquet of dandelions
and place
the soft hearts of artichokes on clean,
shiny plates. I would put on the
Mamas and the Papas
or Blood, Sweat, and Tears, leave by the back door,
the
house bright and open behind me.
I would walk down to where the river bends
just beyond our yard,
meet her at the water's edge.
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