About Obstructed View
“Wendy Vardaman’s extraordinary collection of poems is a triumph of literary coalescence, gracefully combining the erudite with the everyday, the deeply meditative with the witty, the celebratory with the searingly sad. Calling upon her deep knowledge of traditional prosody—and subverting it whenever necessary—the poet also brings to these poems a stylistic polish rarely encountered in this age of open forms. From its thoughtful contemplations on the passage of years to its series of close-ups on the joys and aches of motherhood, Obstructed View speaks to the reader with unobstructed clarity, combining virtuosity / with lyric meditation.”
—Marilyn L, Taylor, Wisconsin Poet Laureate
“Wendy Vardaman is one of the most sincere voices that I chose for my book, Eternal Voices, interviews with strong poets like Adrienne Rich, Sam Hamill, Billy Collins and Joy Harjo. Her common ability with these true poets is her feeling of responsibility for reaching others and especially her true self through poetry. Her poems prove her claim: it is love, not its lack, that compels me to write.”
—Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi (Iranian poet and translator)
“This book may be called Obstructed View, but Wendy Vardaman has a clear view indeed of what it means to be a woman and a writer in 21st century America. Occupying the border between free and formal verse, (there are 15 sonnets, including one called “Unemployed,” an ironic take on motherhood, three sestinas, and several nonce forms) Vardaman tells us about her “rocky romance with God,” “wearing, so it can’t get away from me, my heart on my sleeve,” and we, her readers, are all the wiser for it."
—Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance and Line Dance
Reviews of Obstructed View
" A skilled wordsmith and storyteller, Wendy is also a consummate artist whose written poetry is the literary equivalent of a series of impressionist paintings of ordinary life events—but with words and lines instead of paints and canvas. Highly recommended for poetry readers who appreciate a touch of the 'avant garde' interpretations of the common place and the uncommon moment in verse."
"For as elsewhere in this impressive book, her real aim... is to chronicle how achievement of meaning and metaphor and insight rubs up against the forestalling claims of the material world and the quotidian, only to win out in the end, albeit in a
cool, skeptical, obliquely minimal way."
Poetry & Audio from Obstructed View
Click on the CD image to hear the poem.
An Old Woman’s Pants
Waist-gathered together and tickened there
where blessed elastic yields to accommodate
wide possibilities, accordionate
fast and feast, atop this inverted pear:
I hesitate in folds above a pointless
pocket, whose purpose, neither decorative nor
functional, eludes me and raises a moral
dilemma regarding aesthetics, charity and blindness.
This particular blue pair of pants—their new glass
fabric finish worn and washed away—
lie considerately flat, in profile, careful to stay
as still and quiet as unwatered, just-cut grass,
waiting under the iron, which scarcely alters
what they were, part pressed and filled with her.
Another Reply to My Daughter’s Questions
Phyllis Lyon, 79,(center left) and Del Martin, 83, celebrate Thursday as the first gay couple married by San Francisco city officials.
—Chicago Tribune, 2/13/04
Can I say
that marriage makes no
sense,
that love will never erase
strangeness? she
wants to know.
Look. I show her the
old
ladies, fingers laced
and locked, two
faces made
one at the forehead.
Each
in every line, arch,
form, replied.
See how they
lean into the mo-
ment,
their lives mostly spent
already
together?
What heart could desire
less
than their happiness,
or picture more?
St. Catherine of Siena’s Day, an Ode on My Anniversary
Fifty daffodils, one hundred
hyacinth—buried
last fall produce
only a handful of half-way resurrections:
limp wings on weak
necks emerging from a cracked
tomb—the wrong
soil and a long
winter of low
temperatures without insulating snow.
Content yourself with this:
a few lines, less
than you conceived
by the time they arrived—
scribbled on the back of something else; almost forgotten
between their thought and the interruption
of children, practice,
questions of dinner and the day, cookies
for tomorrow, the last
batch
burned inedible—
and their retrieval;
or with dandelions—too many
to count—bright as any
daffodil but longer lasting, cheerful,
less temperamental,
and a neighbor’s sign, Free
Daylilies, already
tall, fresh dug, ready to return
to bad soil like saints to heaven.
Cracks
In the week that winter
yields to spring, the last snow seeps
into the saggy-doored garage, between wide foundation gaps,
through unevenly settled concrete plates, mixing there
with leaves left by late November:
fall sediment that dries, shrinks, then swells and steeps
as thaw replaces freeze, requiring lapsed
rituals of broom and rake, soap and wipe. I clear
a path to reach my sleeping bike;
extract a stack of dingy plastic chairs, once white;
excavate the dog’s ripe backyard waste,
look for crocus, daffodil, lilac
that shoot up and open in a blink; debate whether we ought
to risk geraniums yet; watch for signs of the buried-last-fall cat, heaved back.
Approaching Menopause
Let the moon pull
hard—let her exert
herself, as a mother
might. Let her pull
the blanket
of the highest tide
up around the chin
of my house, then don’t
stop, but cover
it to the top in thick
water down. Let
her wash away
what I own
and what owns
me. Let me find
one sound
hour’s rest under
her watchful eye.
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