Poetry is not memoir, which is a premise that Carolyn Hembree troubles in her third collection, For Today. “[A]nd why not,” the writer wonders, as “poetry’s long tongue / licking life’s contours, protrusions, dips” (74). In contrast to a spare, rarefied lyric form, Hembree’s written record, which is the original meaning of “memoir,” accumulates rather than contracts. In a mode akin to lyric memoir, the poem guides readers toward a complex epiphany—a centripetal force of activity that I mean as descriptive rather than pejorative. Basking in its observations, Hembree’s verse strolls, struts, idles, cranes the neck, ogles, loiters, holds, speculates, envelops.

But For Today isn’t garbled, shapeless experimentation. Literary context is a guiding constellation. Her collection addresses rather than conceals its antecedents, like Inger Christensen’s alphabet and Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet her father loved and translated. The first section shapes this subject of lineage with a crown of sonnets, “Some Measures,” a structural foil to her diffuse and impressively maximalist final poem. “Some Measures” opens with a paradox: that a parent can be gone, that a child can grow up and away, and yet for Hembree, these departures are only a prelude to haunting and remembering.

“Less of, less often,” the first poem begins, “I see you still, free head— / now gourd in wind, now bauble by crib light // my baby, arm through scalloped sleeve, feels for” (3). The word “less” repeats as it also signifies loss, an experience intensified by what remains. The two metaphors, “gourd” and “bauble,” organic and inorganic, mimic the shifting logic of this sentence, which at first reads as cumulative but whose syntax feels periodic. We don’t understand what the baby in the crib might be reaching for, except for the face of her grandfather who, made clear later in the poem, is dead. So what the poet sees less often is a figurative presence, perhaps a fantasy. The line gnarls so that the phrase “feels for” terminates both the sentence and the illusion. The father never meets, it seems, the speaker’s child.

In another reading, the baby might be feeling for their own head, but the poet’s priority is to obsess over proximity: the collapsible distances between her late father and her newborn, and emotional distances mapped but never diminished, as with her relationship with her mother. “Some Measures” also signifies musical notation, as well as the poet’s emotional cartography, fittingly rendered in this near-traditional crown as each last line emerges, altered slightly, into the subsequent first line of a new poem. The opening section transfigures its predecessors, not just her own family, but Rilke, her father’s translation of “Autumn” splayed throughout the sonnets. But John Berryman is the real poltergeist here, though the text isn’t reducible to his influence only. “O figure of speechless” (3), from the first sonnet, puns the opening of “[l]ess of, less often,” but the dramatic turns and clipped phrases, in addition to archaisms, enriches the language’s intentional theatricality. Some of the finest and most arresting musical lines emerge from this sonic impulse: “She’s sloppier than weather, her red drapes parted: comely gap amid / such sulking gore” (8).

The crown concludes traditionally by revisiting its initial sentence—though this time, after incorporating the father’s autopsy report into the “measures” of the poem, it ends with the word “free” and an em dash—a cut. “There is a healing— / healing, how? —incision” (9), the poet writes. Lyric memoir can acknowledge ambiguity in name, but prefers a nameable center, whether it be acceptance, love, or even justice. Hembree doesn’t avoid the nameable tragedy. Her sonnets structure grief without solving it like an equation, so the lines repeat, shift, and contradict yet remain proximal, her daughter and father almost touching, never.

The next two sections are an interlude— the strongest, “Dizzy Birds Fantasia” and “Funk Hour Fantasia,” reach for improvisatory musical form.The poet’s “baby” has grown into “Kiddo” in a fantastic field guide of New Orleans, a precursor to the collection’s finale. Whereas the first section dwells in familial tension, the middle is often bacchanalian, its open forms convivial. Even in private moments shared by poet and Kiddo, as in “Dizzy Birds Fantasia,” the sweeping lines gather disparate images and experiences: “Traffic in, out our parish, drive-in / daiquiri patronage to avenue, avenue streetcar, transformers, frisbee, loose dogs, no flora or fauna of note. Unless we are of note” (16). This is a New Orleans poem, specifically Riverbend, the topographic feature giving the neighborhood its name. I know that exact daiquiri spot, and have lived near there myself. I don’t find it coincidental that the middle section of the collection turns at this spot, known for its confusing four-way stop, complicated further by a streetcar line. Hembree’s sense of form, in this part prosaic and improvisatory, is local, specific, deftly in conversation with poetic tradition and with the peculiar ingress and egress of her own neighborhood.

The works can feel like a rushed gathering of sensations, as in “Funk Hour Fantasia”: “Dr. DJ prescribes Funk Hour for weeknight blue funk that oozes / under doorjambs through louvers and keyholes to fill my rooms until / lines I love in books I love smear” (18). The line attenuates with detail, an uninterrupted succession of phrases unlike the rest of the poem that can be humorous (“Dose me, Doc, turn up ‘Disco / to Go’”), georgic (“Winter orchards blooming and fruiting”), and frenetic (“Landmark corner bar, stretched leather, streetlights, Lady chapel, crape myrtles, porch swings, prayer / flags, love flag, love bench, my kitchen radio giving up the funk”). Considering the book’s title, Hembree dwells on all the possible functions of the occasional poem, two of them being “August 29, 2005” and “April 2020,” both elegiac in tone and depicting in fraught detail Katrina and this ongoing pandemic. These two texts are metonymic of an era, while the final section—one of my favorite long poems by any writer—is the era of a single day.

“For Today” begins Whitmanic, though later elliptical sections resemble Dickinson's style, especially the compressed bracketed lyrics. Many U.S. poets align themselves with one of these traditions, but Hembree revels in both, reminiscent of C. D. Wright’s essaystic Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. “For Today” metabolizes Wright’s polemic for aesthetic plurality, for fewer “poetry cops on the beat” (38). One Big Self and One With Others, two of Wright’s finest collections, also influence the architecture of Hembree’s final poem, the nomadic forms enlivened by the vernacular of the Ozarks and Mississippi River. Wright, however, is inimitable, so Hembree doesn’t bother with copy, only conversation. “For Today” opens boldly, but isn’t borrowed majesty.:




This tone isn’t just triumphal, beholding the conqueror of despair or the virus. The lines’ portals are already open—we see no agents flinging the gates. Hembree’s choice at once signals restless residents wandering after lockdown and those who never returned home. While some might misinterpret “Hand in hand” as crude, feel-good sentimentalism—a temptation that the poet allows—it actually indicates something realer and more intimate: a mother and child walking to the school bus stop.

The oracular beginning telescopes to the particular: “Honeybees at the fennel” (29). This movement establishes the scalar logic of the poem, global and local, a sidewalk poem, a speaker whose attention oscillates left and right, accounting for the world. The poet chronicles the day in spacious, prosimetric lines and various forms, at times couplets and others contrapuntal. This is the shape of attention, of thinking and of breath. While the writing can evoke the peculiars of the external world (“We turn at a pothole-turned birdbath (finch ablutions!)”), Hembree’s focus can be inward, reflective: “What do I know of anyone’s inside lives? (door open—look!— / a whole house under that sunny riot of cat’s claw in bloom)” (31). External and internal can also interchange, as evidenced by the last sentence—describing an exterior, yet presented parenthetically.

Inger Christensen’s famous epistrophe populates the poem, with poet and Kiddo naming all the things that “exist,” like “palm trees” (43), and this poem is also punctuated by text messages from P, struggling with cancer, wanting also to remain in existence. The concatenation isn’t just to name but to preserve. For Hembree, there’s no one form that could account for this day, but the poem’s form often shifts to couplets when the poet remembers scenes between herself and Kiddo, a choice that intensifies the images even as they are sometimes more colloquial: “what about today? palm trees and what else / exists?” (32). Hembree finds this music in simple names and phrases like “Beauty shop, pawn shop, body shop (too early to open)” while her attention might also bracket a concentrated lyric observation about crawfish bagged:

[amid red shell heaps

an absconder snaps, scuttles

Riverward—flee!] (34)

This accumulative poem avoids cluttering the pages as various everyday tropes hold the work and day together, like her sun hat, a church bell, the bus, and phrases (“World at large, world at home”). Her late father also reappears, his translation of the “Duino Elegies” represented by a single line and then the initial phrase of “Who, if I cried out,” thereafter echoed in this bracketed couplet: “[line played out / poetry is not memoir].” That’s the predicament of translation, which she defines as “to carry across.” If we’re not reading memoir proper, then we are immersed in the idiosyncratic etymology of a poet:

Mornings, he carried me on his shoulders across our snow-covered (gray slush, really) neighborhood

to my brick school on a hill. Daughter, he always called me. I could

see the top of his ushanka (ear-flaps up) bristling, atavistic bristle.

Blue mountains retreated just when I might have pressed

my forehead into their soft outlines (39)

The poet needs “poetry and doubt,” or perhaps wonders if poetry is a “scintilla of doubt” (39). Father exists. Daughter, too. And Kiddo. That is the lineage of the collection, the unbroken line from which Hembree casts her mind into the uncertain dark. Whereas the crown of sonnets sequenced grief, this finale trawls. The negative space reminds me, at times, of Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard,” but the philosophical and poetic inquiry isn’t aesthetic, complacent pondering, but urgent, vital, and intimate, a felt experience of what it means to be this writer, a mother for whom “today exists” (42), but tentatively. For today, yes, but also for now.

For Today evokes the public and the private, a personal patchwork of literary traditions. Like other recent poetry books (see Dan Chiasson’s Math Campers), “For Today” is processional, not quite procedural, as all the naming, the experimental spaciousness, the lyrical observations, the memories and anxieties of family—a father’s struggle with depression, a child practicing the modern death ritual of “quarterly lockdown drills”—coalesce into a reenactment of mother and Kiddo writing their own alphabet book: “D is for days” (84). They’re home, the school day complete, just the two of them with thunder outside. There’s no Father. No spouse. They name “one thing over another” (88), an index of their existence, like apricots and azaleas and bees and magnolias. If there is an epiphany, it’s the unadorned world itself. These two, mother and child, remain within the couplet form that rushes into a final uncontracted line, the “us” united with its imperative verb “let,” perhaps the only way this brilliant and wandering collection could end: “lets go” (89).