The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart: Poems

A fan of Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Anne Carson, & C.D. Wright, among others, this was one of the most astounding collections of poetry I have ever read. Please read and support this wonderful poet!

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is currently a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University (where she was previously a Wallace Stegner Fellow). Her poetry has been published in a number of important literary journals. The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart is a compilation of some of her best work to date and gives voice to the hope and heartbreak of contemporary rural and small-town American. Graves We Filled Before the Fire: Some lose children in lonelier ways:/tetanus, hard falls, stubborn fevers//that soak the bedclothes five nights running./Our two boys went out to skate, broke//through the ice like battleships, came back/to us in canvas bags; curled//fossils held fast in ancient stone,/four hands reaching. Then two//sad beds wide enough for planting/wheat or summer-squash but filled//with boys, a barren crop. Our lives/stripped clean as oxen bones.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi's poems sweep up behind us like the 1944 Hartford circus fire she writes about in them. Everyone in the big tent, women and children mostly, it being 1944 - is having a marvelous time, la, la, la. The acrobats are "an entire family / suspended from a miniature porch swing." What could go wrong? They're just like us, only tiny. Then wham! In seconds the tent is engulfed in flames. Hundreds have died, leaving "Our lives / stripped clean as oxen bones." Hartford citizens remember that fire to this day, and this book has a similarly stubborn effect. Its poems are full of porch swings and oxen bones, images ordinary Americans might reach for to describe extraordinary events. The humility of the images, together with Calvocoressi's ventriloquism, is what gives them their powerful stealth. We don't read about so much as overhear her large cast of characters - a big tent for a short book - grapple with problems of memory: how to express it, how to explain it, how to live with it, and how to live by it. The poet gets out of the way of her poems, freely admits "Having Never Been to Gettysburg," and lets "Sedge grass, Little Bluestem, Bristlecone Pine / (O if this were the worst of it)" be "Not me, that insatiable lyric, darkening / The doorway of small town beauty / Parlours." Enter those incognito temples with your hat off, big tip in hand (her characters could use the money) and due respect.

I'm an 11th and 12th grade English teacher who loved the book so much, I dropped a couple poems into my American Literature Curriculum during a Modern Poetry Unit. The kids have responded well, particularly to "Circus Fire, 1944," and some even made the choice to focus on a few of the poems for their poetry presentations. The nature of Calvocoressi's poetry is perfect for class due to the mix of stark, forceful imagery and thematic complexity. In other words, the poems are accessible, yet still allow for complex and engaging classroom discussions/disagreements - certainly no mean feat.