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Journey Fruit
Poetry by Kinereth Gensler
Reviewed by Rachel Barenblat
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"An orange is the perfect journey fruit," writes Kinereth Gensler, "with its thick, faintly pitted skin and its slightly flattened poles like the earth seen from space." Her book of poems, Journey Fruit, is like an orange: its simple exterior gives no glimpse of the delights held within. Like an orange, Gensler's poems are delicious, fragrant with far-away lands, redolent of mythic and Biblical times.
Gensler's poems tell her story, one deeply connected with travel and journeying; she grew up in two countries at once, spending school months in Jerusalem where her father taught, spending summers in Chicago and Maine. We learn, reading her poems, about transatlantic travel on ships: "Back then, before the United Nations, / before John Foster Dulles flew across time zones / with his instant airport-to-airport diplomacy, / to reach the Middle East you traveled abroad, / you went overseas" |
 Journey Fruit By Kinereth Gensler Hardcover - $ 9.95 Published March 1997 Alice James Books (Sd) |
The book begins with a lone poem, a kind of prelude to the book's eventual sections, called "To Make an Offering."
Peel away the layers.The heart can be offered peeled, like the orange Gensler describes later in the collection. Or it can be truncated, as religion may demand. But her offering, Gensler leads us to understand, is an offering of wholeness: "intact, as it was given," with only a small blemish, a test of ripeness. This book could be her offering of wholeness, as easily as her heart could be. This book could easily be her heart.
That's one way.
Or else, God's radical incision:
"Circumcise your heart that you may live."
But I shall let my heart be,
intact, as it was given,
removing only a plug,
--that test for ripeness-
lifted
as from a watermelon.
A plunge to the core
Through the tough green casing.
The book is subtitled "Poems and a Memoir," and the two flow into each other without jarring transition. There is a section of poems; then a personal story; then poems again. We learn about Palestine's profusion of spring wildflowers in the time before the war brought waves of immigrants and the environment changed; about a man with a donkey, watering fields during the dry season with slaughterhouse blood; about the stones of Jerusalem.
The third section of the book, dedicated to Gensler's late husband, provides a beautiful counterpoint to the stories of childhood, travel, and past: these are pieces for and about her husband, written after his death. In "A Kind of Conversation," she writes,
I thought they were crazy,Like Marie Howe's poems to her brother in What the Living Do, like Donald Hall's poems to his late wife Jane Kenyon in Without, Gensler's poems to her husband are both simple and excruciatingly beautiful.
the ones who talk to themselves
(I thought that's what they did), but maybe
they speak the way I speak with you,
who can't hear me, being dead,
asking you what to do (I know your answer,
after so many years, which helps),
catching you up on the news,
a not-quite-one-sided conversation,
the habits of intercourse being so strong.
Poet and fiction-writer Alice Mattison has written, "Alert to irony and at ease with sorrow, Gensler offers us a generous, exciting book." I couldn't agree with her more. Journey Fruit is startling in its specificity of detail, but that detail doesn't isolate it; instead, its particularity allows it to resonate. This book is beautiful and strong. Read it and enjoy.
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Rachel Barenblat is editor of The Women's Times, a monthly paper published in Great Barrington. She's also finishing an MFA at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first chapbook of poems, "the skies here," was published by Pecan Grove Press in 1995; her poems have recently appeared in The Portland Review, The Jewish Women's Literary Annual, and Confrontation.
Her homepage can be found at http://members.tripod.com/~Rachel/.
When not writing, she bakes a lot of bread and plays with her cat.