Seeing what’s possible

In Nature Poems To See By (Plough, 152 pp.), Julian Peters provides fresh takes on 24 classic poems—not by changing or commenting on their contents but by illustrating each in comic-panel style. But do the illustrations complement the text in a way that furthers its meaning?

At times, Peters’ drawings for Philip Larkin’s “The Trees,” for example, wordlessly tell a story of a woman and a child attending a funeral in a green grove. The text discusses how trees’ “yearly trick of looking new / is written down in rings of grain.” The accompanying panels show a wooden coffin, then the artist’s eye zooms out on one tree—then one tree and one house—then a whole neighborhood of trees and houses as the poem intones, “Last year is dead, they seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”

Not every poem succeeds in this way. Because of its broad range of topics and art styles, the book struggles for unity—a grappling the reader feels. Does the variety refresh, or confuse? Would the material be better served if it featured as many artists as it does poets? Also, this volume contains some poems with heavy themes (for instance, Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning”), so despite its preponderance of pictures it could only selectively be shared with children.

If Nature Poems stretches one artist in a few too many directions, What’s Possible (Slant, 240 pp.) harvests the best of an artist’s long, deep work. Robert Cording’s new and selected poems open with a series of poems about the tragic loss of the poet’s adult son. The title, What’s Possible, has a much sadder meaning than the reader expects: It’s possible that Daniel, Cording’s son, is dead, is not coming back. It’s possible that the world will go on: “my emptied red mug / of tea, the can of tea leaves, the teapot / that made the tea. The loaf / of raisin bread. The cutting board / and knife.” The book—not just the opening—tends toward sorrow. But it never becomes maudlin, and Cording, a Christian, processes his grief in the context of faith without veering into heresy or platitude.

What’s Possible moves in a chronological circle, starting from the present where Daniel is dead. Then it moves back to Cording’s earliest poems, where Daniel and Cording’s other children are still young. The reader by this point has learned to look for Daniel, so the second part of the book feels haunted by the first. As the circle moves forward through Cording’s later collected poems, doubt (the opposite side of the coin of faith) figures large. So large it feels crushing at times. But it also adds to Cording’s emotional credibility.

“Like Christ on the Emmaus road concealed / from his disciples by his ordinariness, / the commonplace is sometimes hardest to see,” Cording writes in his poem “Common Life.” Cording helps us see the commonplace—raisin bread, birds, profound tragedy—in a way that makes us step back and notice our own miraculous lives.