A Walk with Frank O’Hara
Susan Aizenberg
University of New Mexico Press, 2024

T

o refer to a book as “capacious” might at first blush seem a likely description of a fat, maximalist novel, but the term can also apply, in the case of Susan Aizenberg’s A Walk with Frank O’Hara, to a svelte volume of poetry.

Divided into three sections, these 45 poems range from the speaker’s personal history to contemporary politics to events in previous centuries, sometimes in the same poem. A number of poems begin with lines from other poets, or, as in the title poem, with the reimagining of another poet. The result is a heightened sense of connectedness.

The speaker’s parents often provide a springboard into the past. The poem “Hunger” is a sober portrait of an unhappy father that uses food to conjure up an entire era. His is a world of potatoes every night (“Idahoes the size of baby / shoes in their blackened skin—”) with Walter Cronkite on the black-and-white TV. The man’s anger serves as “the kindling that kept him thin.” The Vietnam War looms large in several of Aizenberg’s poems, while the speaker’s mother appears at various stages in life, from hopeful youth to final decline and death. The poems “Three Rispetti” and “First Light” are among the most moving in this collection.

Formally speaking, Aizenberg often favors unrhymed couplets to create discrete units of thought that can stand on their own while also being flexible enough to serve as pieces of longer, more discursive meditations, as in “The Beautiful American Word Baby.” The poem is too long to quote in its entirety here, but the speaker amusingly explores sociological nuances of baby, babe, sugar baby, honey baby, baby doll, dear baby, etc.

. . . Honey

Was for drag queens and sitcom husbands—
campy as a big wig and falsies, homely as Schlitz
and socks on the bedroom floor. Doll reeked
of menace, cold eyes, hard slap, sharp
flick of a switchblade. Dear was unthinkable—
Ozzie and Harriet, virginal librarians

There are also a number of ekphrastic poems, across a variety of media. “La Liseuse” addresses Mary Cassatt’s portrait of her sister, and meditates on the life of the model, and her importance as a help-meet to the artist. “At the Chicago Art Institute” considers a Brancusi sculpture, while other poems, like “Tea Boys” (about Salaam, Bombay!), “Forced March” (about the real-life Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti) and “Michael Corleone Prepares for Bed” (about The Godfather II) explore the power of film, moving deftly from aesthetic appreciation to the highly personal. Regarding Corleone, the speaker observes:

. . . the scene’s
not meant to be erotic,
but because you are gone
I’m seized with a longing so strong
I could raise a car with it.

Contemporary culture—coronavirus, CNN, the Taliban—is sometimes mentioned in these poems but Aizenberg generally avoids the fodder of the news cycle and quick, easy judgments. “Errata” is an fascinating, sadly wise poem about human limitations, cruelty and our capacity for self-deceit. But though the poet does not preach, she is also unsparing. For instance, “Not One Woman I Know Hasn’t These Stories” is the best poem I’ve read about sexual harassment.

A Walk with Frank O’Hara is probing and wide-ranging, highly personal without being solipsistic, and, for its variety, refreshingly unpredictable from one poem to the next. This is first-rate work.