Walking Toward Cranes, Amy Small-McKinney (Glass Lyre Press, 2017)

 

Many startling images weave through Amy Small-McKinney’s new book of poetry, Walking Toward Cranes.   One of my favorites is  “there is a turtle in my mouth…he will not be banished.”

Small-McKinney is creating a moving landscape that mirrors her struggle and journey with breast cancer and what comes after.  Her images are stark but also personal: “I am beginning to remember my body/I will wake up tomorrow.  I am not a leaf.”  She moves from the intimate to the universal: “Inside a hollowed out body, what is left?” to “When I was a girl I used my hair as a kind of weapon.”

The poet is not afraid to reach beyond sentiment to unspeakable feelings, unknowable outcomes: “My real life hides in trees, beneath deep snow./If I open my door, the wind will divide me.”

The book is divided into three sections: Treatment, The Healing, and Walking Toward Cranes.  In the poem “Inside the world” in the first section, she writes:

 

I may be wrong or misunderstand borders.

That’s cancer.

Every day my body is a different place.

 

In these poems, Small-McKinney is not afraid to open the door to her sadness, her pain.  But she can ground herself enough to incorporate what she is losing:

 

I should lug the limbs felled from the storm,

whole trees at places,

pile them beside the road for pick up.

 

In the second section, The Healing, she begins to see a way back: “Home is not where I live,/it is sleeve of a daughter.”  She describes the physical losses and heartache of having her body invaded by an unwelcome intruder: “For the couch, it is the shaved head,/hours of a body hanging on as though a raft”.  But she is also not afraid to reveal the depth of her fear: “Well, she is afraid.  Seductive fire,/articulate rain, all of this being alive.”

She grapples with the physicality of the body and her time taking in all the lessons that implies:

 

a bog can be destroyed.

Still, I am rainwater.

I love what is unexpected.

What falls from the sky, falls into me.

 

She lets herself imagine all directions, past, present, future:

When I was a little girl, night after night,

I imagined a funeral, a torn black ribbon

pinned to my blouse.

 

When the poet reaches the third section, Walking Toward Cranes, she begins to feel a future reappear and lets herself imagine in another way:

I want to travel, probably won’t.

I want to walk into a village where a woman weaves yarn,

squat beside her, not condescending,

not sentimental, but because I am lost.

 

Her honesty about her own feelings of loss pervade this book, but there is a curve of repair and coming back to the world with new insights:

 

I know there is another tree that sways

outside my new home, new window.

It tells me when the world is hard,

when it is forgiving.

 

This is a moving, beautiful book about walking through darkness and coming to light, without complaint.  Small-McKinney has a clear vision kept focused on the real world and the world of endless possibilities.