#300: DESPITE THE MESS OF US, THE HURT, THE EMPTY.  My first acquaintance with the work of Ada Limón was running across “The End of Poetry” in an issue of the New Yorker.  It was the kind of poem that makes you hope that, after writing it, the poet relaxed, took her boots off, had a beer, and slept the sleep of the satisfied and accomplished.  Her 2025 collection of new and selected poems, Startlement, merely extends that hope: it’s full of poems that are humane above all, balanced and nuanced in cadence, various in mood, ardent, finished.  By that last I mean finely worked out, with the snap of the exactly right, rather than poems working out a subject and closing over it, like something buried in the back yard.  Limon is always exploratory, with a constant impulse to see everything around her thoroughly, to see more than to label or contain.  She’s hard to excerpt, as the poems are so tightly woven.  Here is “I Remember the Carrots”:

I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life,

a really good one even, sitting in the kitchen

in Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I’ll be—

the advance of fulfillment, of desire—

all these needs met, then unmet again.

When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots,

their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot

And so I ripped them all out, I broke the new roots

and carried them, like a prize, to my father

who scolded me, rightly, for killing the whole crop.

I loved them: my own bright dead things.

I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.

Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented

the contentment of the field.  Why must we practice

this surrender?  What I mean is: there are days

I still want to kill the carrots because I can.

       Limón’s poems are wonderfully terrestrial: there are place names, animals, flowers, all in specific: every poem has a landscape.  Maybe, having been raised in the sfumato of New England daylight, I notice the sharp-edged sun in these verses: they are always cleanly seen as well as musically voiced.  The poems are almost hard to characterize, because there are no hobby-horses in them, no agendas, no stubborn slants pulling them out of true.  Startlement comes to seem an apt title for the collection, gathering twenty years of work, as startlement is surely the right state of the poet: she’s noticed something, she’s looking at it, she wants to get it right.  I always think of Seamus Heaney at a reading years ago, saying “This poem was written in hope, as all poems are.”  Here’s “Instructions for Not Giving Up”:

More than the fuschia funnels breaking out

of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s

almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving

their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate

sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees

that really gets to me. When all the shock of white

and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave

the pavements strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

the leaves come.  Patient, plodding, a green skin

growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

to the strange idea of continuous living despite

the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.  Fine then,

I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Startlement: New and Selected Poems, by Ada Limón.  Milkwood Editions, 2025.