Sakura Park: Poems, Rachel Wetzsteon, Persea Books, Incorporated, 2006, 0892553243, 9780892553242, 115 pages. With this third collection, Rachel Wetzsteon continues to imprint American verse with her particular brand of smart, tart poems. These new pieces employ her remarkable formal agility in order to showcase an assortment of quarreling themes: learning and loss, autonomy and loneliness, love and work. The result is the rare book that is equal parts sass and sorrow..

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Born in , poet and editor Rachel Wetzsteon received degrees from , , and . She made her home in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, which is the setting for many of her formally assured poems. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Soren Kierkegaard, and Philip Larkin, Wetzsteon infused her urban and emotional landscapes with a dry wit. As critic Adam . . .

With this third collection, Rachel Wetzsteon continues to imprint American verse with her particular brand of smart, tart poems. These new pieces employ her remarkable formal agility in order to showcase an assortment of quarreling themes: learning and loss, autonomy and loneliness, love and work. The result is the rare book that is equal parts sass and sorrow.

In this accessible yet sinuous third collection, 's landscape becomes a subtle metaphor for a complex inner life in which hope makes room for despair and joyful recklessness attempts to coexist with sober wisdom. Using a variety of forms—from sonnets, haikus and ghazals to extended free verse and prose poems—Wetzsteon probes disturbing contradictions: "the heart's response is a matter of / degree, not kind—whether the ax is lifted / in ardor or in fury, the frozen sea still melts." She revels in melancholy, imploring, "[t]ake me back / to where thunder claps in minds and skies / and hearts are glad to be unhappy," and admits that there is safety in identifying with one's own pain: "I'm lost without my precious wounds; scrape the welts away and there's no one left to be kind to." Finally, in the title poem, set in a park near the poet's New York home, where "petals lift and scatter / like versions of myself I was on the verge / of becoming," Wetzsteon (Home and Away, 1998) acknowledges the futility, and also the necessity, of her struggle: while awaiting "sweet reprieve /... / meanwhile's far from nothing:/ the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees." These poems are deep and artfully crafted. (July 7)

I've been waiting for this collection to come out for some time based on the strength of pieces like "Love and Work" first featured in The New Yorker about five years ago and "On Leaving The Bachelorette Lunch" from Poetry a couple of years back. If you're reading this buyer's review then you're probably already aware of Wetzsteon's formal adroitness. She's a votary of Auden and she's inherited some of her master's huge empathy, self deprecation and erudition. But unlike, say, the later work of Auden, she wears her learning as lightly as a summmer dress(the seasons are a theme she goes back to again and again in these gorgeous urban pastorals). More than any poems I know, this collection depicts a negotiation between the need for privacy (creative space?) and the need for intimacy. The tension makes for first-rate lyric drama. Sometimes Sakura Park reads like Sex and The City for the intellectually adventurous, heck, the intellectually uninhibited. It's very much a hypereducated thirty something's sentimental education. There are references to Wittgenstein and Weil which are simultaneously funny, respectful and seamlessly integrated into their respective poems. Many pieces smack of seriousness and wit:

These poems are a perpetual coming to terms that we're lucky to eavesdrop on. Like good movies? I don't know of any poet who has been able to internalize the sensibility of the Sturges/Hawks/Cukor screwball comedienne like Wetzsteon has. Pauline Kael would be proud. If I have one quibble with the persona behind most of the poems, it's the x factor of social class. The poems depict the universe of The Upper West Side aesthete with refulgent beauty. In fact, the poet uses the phrase "my city" in different pieces. One wishes the poet/flaneuse would train her gaze on some of the meaner streets Baudelaire or , god help us, Eliot evoke. That being said, this is her best book yet. "Evening News", "Dachsund" "But For The Grace" and "Love and Work" are great poems. You will find yourself going back to these and works just as sprightly for their playfulness and wisdom. Read more ›

I love books but I have struggled to find poetry that I truly enjoy. Maybe Emily Dickinson. I don't have to make that effort with Rachel Wetzsteon's work. If you're thinking of owning one book of poetry, buy this one. The title poem still fascinates me and I've read countless times. It's not the only jewel in here. Great book!

Sakura Park showcases Rachel Wetzsteon's poetic style and talent as she invites the reader to share in an emotional wealth of romantic insights with respect to the meaning of love, life, truth and beauty. Pemberley: The park was very large. We drove/for some time through a beautiful wood/until the wood ceased, and the house came into view./Inside were miniatures, small faces/we gawked at until a housekeeper showed us/the maste's finer portrait in an upper room./I dredged up a shaming moment:/you asked me a question, then ducked as I spewed/an idiot's vitriol, blindness disguised as rage./The house stood well on rising ground, and beneath its slopes the thirsty couples/held their glasses high at Cafe Can't Wait./ I spent time at its flimsy tables/but then I walked under trees whose leaves/exhaled gusty stories of good deeds;/I learned empty houses are excellent teachers;/I sent you away and felt you grow/tremendous sin your absence. Ask me again.

The late Wetzsteon was, like her predecessors Auden, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane, a poet of the city, albeit not of an entire city. She lived and died in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her foremost influence is W.H. Auden, for which she has been criticized. I suspect that metrical poetry today is perceived as artificial and cold while turns of phrases are considered clever and witty, but Wetzsteon's poetry is not cotton candy superficial. Many of her poems use the consistent theme of clouds and sky to mirror the insidious nature of depression without becoming confessional or dramatic. Her poems are painful in a less obvious way, as in "Love and Work," where she wants to be intellectual and sexually attractive but is also aware that society and other women will not allow the two possibilities for their fellow women:

Wetzsteon is like Ezra Pound in that she is aware of all the personae women must use to survive in the world, but she is not polemical or political about it; she would rather it not overwhelm her within her poems while she observes discordant behavior and contradictions for the reader. Her poems are witty, light, and charming, with a hint of frivolity and occasional sadness. There is gallow's humor in her "Mystery for Cigarettes," knowing that the habit is unhealthy and that smoke is metaphor-rich: delusion, glamor, illusion, and self-destruction

Wetzsteon should not be compared to Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Bishop, as some critics, for some inexplicable reason, seem to do. It is true that she did not write poetry as the Baudelaire of The Bowery but she did create evocative imagery in her "Blue Octavo Haiku," and walk the reader through, among other things, break-ups, crack-ups, an ambulance ride, and cherry blossoms in "Sakura Park." The unfortunate thing about hindsight with Rachel Wetzsteon is that we know she read Auden, that she died, and that she left behind a legacy of poetry, but the uncomfortable feeling I get in reading her poems is the same feeling I got in reading Plath and Sexton, and that is the inevitable in her poem "Sakura Park": Rachel Wetzsteon: Rachel Wetzsteon is the author of two previous poetry collections, The Other Stars and Home and Away, and a book of criticism about W. H. Auden, Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources. Her poems regularly appear in leading magazines and journals, among them The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Raritan, Salmagundi, and The Yale Review. In 2001, Wetzsteon was the recipient of the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at William Paterson University in New Jersey and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and lives near Sakura Park in New York City's Morningside Heights. (Photo © David Savatteri)

About Sakura Park: “Rachel Wetzsteon’s poems are so smart, brave, human, and elegantly turned that it’s hard to resist quoting one after another. She has made Manhattan her beat, the New York of the single girl-woman, flaneuse, heartbreak survivor, smoker, wit, and bookworm. She pours these moods and situations so deftly through so wide a range of forms that one hardly notices the bravura craft. One feels, instead, the heart pulsing.”

“As in her earlier books, Rachel Wetzsteon writes with a quick-witted discernment, a searching vigilance, and a formal virtuosity. But Sakura Park has a new depth and amplitude. It is a large-hearted, full-throated gathering of poems, each a rare glimpse into a sensibility as feathered and sharp as an arrow, an imagination as taut and true as a bowstring. Wetzsteon is a poet no smart reader can afford to miss.”

Born in New York City, New York, the daughter of editor Ross Wetzsteon (the name is pronounced "whetstone"[2]), she graduated from Yale University in 1989 where she studied with Marie Borroff and . She graduated from Johns Hopkins University with an MA, and from Columbia University with a Ph.D. She taught at .

In a perfect world, Rachel Wetzsteon would be one of the most popular poets of her generation. You would see people in the outdoor cafes along Upper Broadway reading copies of Sakura Park, her third collection, the way pilgrims to Greenwich Village carry Scott Fitzgerald or Edna St. Vincent Millay. For Wetzsteon's poems manage to turn Morningside Heights—a quiet, bourgeois neighborhood near Columbia University, home to the park of her title—into a theater of romance, an intellectual haven, a flaneur's paradise. Her poems evoke the kind of life that generations of young people have come to New York to live—earnest, glamorous, and passionate, full of sex and articulate suffering...[10]

Rachel Wetzsteon’s inheritance from W.H. Auden (she’s the author of Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden’s Sources) is nowhere more apparent than in her third collection. Just as in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,― where life goes on as Icarus plunges into the sea, Wetzsteon has set a tale of personal heartbreak against the bustling, vivid life of New York City.[11]

I appreciate the word play. She plays with sounds and homophones and rhyme and words that sound alike and are one letter away but have completely different meanings. Is there a word for that? You know, like union/onion or buster/bluster. No, these are not the word pairings she uses; that would probably make for a really bad collection. Her collection is the opposite of bad.

Sadly the due date at the library came up before I finished this collection of sad, urban poems. Filled with beautiful imagery of cities, primarily New York, and tied together with a thread of loneliness, these are wonderful poems by a poet who had mastered classical forms. Her recent death is a waste and a sorrow.

I used take our daughter up there for walks, in her first two years. Across the street is Grant's Tomb, one of the most beautiful buildings in America....more Bias here: the cover is mine, a photo from when we lived near Columbia University, only a block from lovely Sakura Park. See [http://douglashopkins.blogspot.com/].

With great sadness, we at the The New Republic learned this week of the death of Rachel Wetzsteon, our poetry editor. Rachel only joined TNR a few months ago, and she had just begun to make her mark on the poetry we publish. But we admired her own poems for years: at 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, distinguished by her natural gift for form, her tough urban romanticism, and her appealing combination of melancholy and wit. Her three books of poems—Other Stars (1994), Home and Away (1998), and Sakura Park (2006)—show a steady increase in mastery and feeling, as she took on the inheritance of Larkin and Auden (about whom she wrote a critical study, “Influential Ghosts―) and made it her own. Sakura Park, named after a park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where she lived, is a lovely and moving book about romance and disillusion, conjuring a life that is at once intellectual and glamorous and heartbroken. We had looked forward to working with Rachel, and reading her, for many years to come, and we join her many readers, friends, and colleagues in mourning her loss. In her memory, we present two of her poems below.

A compilation of nocturnal splendors and candid admissions of loneliness, Rachel Wetzsteon’s third collection, Sakura Park, depicts New York interiors as hard-won refuges where “…banners of dawn / are teases, are sorrows, are prizes, are hunters― and “where all seems possible― even as days pass “like sedated madmen.― With formal elegance, the after hours unwind in pensive states. Her speaker often considers the problems of love, but even when the language turns familiar (“Be the rain for my barren indoor cry―; “Sink, heart, sink / into your latest chains;― “this wholly unexpected blast / from the past―) a droll knowingness pervades the work. She also acknowledges the possibility for change:

This optimism is especially noteworthy, as it does not spring from naïveté, and is not a destination, but an ongoing, variegated process. Of depression much has already been written. Jane Kenyon famously explored it in her poem, “Having It Out With Melancholy,― and there is often resurgent interest in drawing parallels between a writer’s life and their work, but it is important to remember that Wetzsteon’s 2009 suicide has not rendered her book any more or less “autobiographical― than it ever was, despite the struggle it portrays. Sakura Park offers a fuller portrait than just a search for stability amidst settings that easily proclaim “levels attained.― Moods are presented as shifting occasions rather than as continually oppressive forces.

In the midst of reflection, a confident wit emerges, allowing for lines such as “The lonely nomads fled their monads,― “democracy is good for the world / but ruinous for the heart,― and for dramatization in “doomed girls weeping on rocks― or “the noise in my room is the sounding brass // and tinkling cymbal of a weary one-girl band.― The hope for a different conclusion to otherwise monotonous days resurfaces again in “About Time― —

— and also in “A Bluff,― where “a roar of sirens, traffic, absence— / a sweet confusion― remains “unknown to lovers / soundly asleep in the still of the silent night.― Wetzsteon’s speaker repeatedly surveys the city below, marking the divide between outside and inside, day and night. In “A Bluff,― she writes:

Impressively, this repetition in theme does not wear thin; it gradually evolves and loosens in strictness. In subsequent poems, the speaker is depicted outdoors in the rain, or passing “bouquets outside the store― with a renewing sense that it is possible to find pleasures in the day, even if the realization is small as “a low voice choked with wonder, These are roses.― At other times a cautious stance remains: http://kgarch.org/fe5.pdf http://kgarch.org/867.pdf http://kgarch.org/6i1.pdf http://kgarch.org/ck3.pdf