Cold River by Joan Larkin

Cold River

Joan Larkin

Joan Larkin’s Lambda Award-winning Cold River deals in universal obsessions: sex and death, filtered in this case through memory and social consciousness. Innocence meets experience early in the book, intertwining in the tercets of ‘In the Duchess (Sheridan Square, 1973),’ in which the young speaker watches ‘the illegal dancing’ of ‘strong beauty’ on the scuffed barroom floor. Remembering the scene from today, she knows she’ll ‘soon cut my hair, soon / sharpen cuffs and creases,/ burn bold as the stone/ butch staring back/ in whose smile my fear/ and wanting found a mirror.’ Throughout the book, she tempers her bold politics with a warm embrace for her friends, as in ‘Sonnet Positive,’ a fine poem wherein the speaker accompanies a friend on a ‘slow drive/ to Vermont on back roads–lunch, a quick look/ at antiques.’ Concluding when they pull over to examine some merchandise, she writes:

He’s not actually sick yet, he reminds me,

reaching for the next pill. His bag’s full

of plastic medicine bottles, his body

of side effects, as he stoops to look at a low

table whose thin, perfect legs perch on snow.

Larkin moves from offhand personal experience to a wider scope in the smart and plaintive ‘Inventory,’ which begins as a list of details about individual AIDS victims, grows into a history of reactions to the disease, then concludes with an incantatory elegy for what has been lost. Great tragedy can generate enduring poetry, from Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ to the Black Plague’s innocent nursery rhymes. Joan Larkin responds to the AIDS pandemic with this obligation and these models in mind. Not only is Cold River good, it is absolutely necessary. –Edward Skoog

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