Necessary Turns by Liz Abrams-Morley Word Press
book review by J. Alpha
"We opened the box that held all she had become
and flung her among lush wetland reeds between a blue ocean and red-tide bay,
toward a bleeding sunset, into a brazenly painted day's end."
Necessary Turns is a rich and succinctly crafted collection of poems by Liz Abrams-Morley. Infused with wisdom and encompassing the themes of loss, grief, mortality, age, and the capricious nature of life, Abrams-Morley’s poems read like part short story, part memoir... pure poetry.
From "My Father, After the Memorial Service"
On a closet shelf,
An old man, mostly deaf,
Leaning into the cacophonous
silence.
His hands brim
With quiet and hours.
He bends to pick up the scattered
questions.
Additionally, her poems—akin to narrative visions—embrace a sensual use of colors, smell, sounds, taste, and touch... evoking auras of truth summoned forth by her love of language.
From "Alone, On a Good Day, My Sister and I"
And if the air smelled of rain that day,
the sand was diamond studded,
cool under a low canopy of clouds,
along a sea the exact green shade of our
favorite modeling clay, gray-green
of the frenzied dolphin pride we watched
The depths of Abrams-Morley's personal and poetic perceptions of the passages and people in her life simultaneously evolve as the concise narrative themes in Necessary Turns powerfully advance through time and a universal resonance of emotions—moving beyond the clutter of personal narrative that often limit self-referential poetry.
From "Elegies for the Living"
It's not only death, Esther in February, Bob
in the heat of summer, Jeremy just as leaves fell, but the way
life rises up, swells around the stone solidness
of rigor mortis and engulfs the death, The way life
itself goes on like a stream, loosed and moving
despite snow over rocks, then, every-so-often, around
some bend where the stream still, ice forms.
Nothing flows. The deaths that catch up with you
are at every turn.
In poem after poem, readers will discover pleasing jolts of poetic recognitions that serve to strengthen the vivid form and function of the entire collection.
From "Star Chart"
Who was here last year who is not here today? My hands
press creases into sheets thinned by use, thinned by
repeated washings, sheets that have stretched thin
over a dozen twin mattresses. Sheets
fat with memory.
Abrams-Morley's compelling metaphorical explorations are personal, yet modest, creating an appealing intimacy that serves to accommodate the heart, mind and spirit of the reader.
Liz Abrams-Morley—co-founder and co-director of Around the Block Writers' Collaborative—is also the author of Learning to Calculate the Half life (Zinka Press, 2001) and What Winter Reveals (Plan B Press, 2005). Her poems and short stories have appeared in a variety of nationally distributed journals and anthologies, and her poetry and fiction have been featured on National Public Radio.