Benjamin J. Chase. Here to See It. Kelsay Books, 2022.

We do not very often review poetry books. There are a few reasons. Except for anthologies, few come to our attention. A lot of contemporary poetry is either morally or politically crass. The features of one’s partner’s body or the vagaries of whoever is in the White House are truly ephemeral.

The title and the poems reminded this reader of Garrison Keillor’s homey book Happy to Be Here. Here to See It is a typical small volume of about thirty short poems. Some have a sense of humor. Most have effective imagery. Like many lyric poems, Chase takes a simple event or image and does something more with it.

It can be something as simple as buying an iced coffee on the first day of a spring thaw. It can be a simple image of the poet’s father, one who is always there, perhaps taken for granted, like Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Chase teaches high school, and both teachers and students can appreciate the “isosceles triangle” created at a parent-student-teacher conference, and seeing who is going to be the good cop and who the bad cop. Echoes of Taylor Mali’s middle school poems.

Three poems really stood out that perhaps indicate something of the poet’s motivation or inspiration. “Love for Emily D” is a quatrain punctuated with dashes like Emily Dickinson. It is a lighthearted homage to the Belle of Amherst. Two poems meditate on paintings by Edward Hopper. Hopper’s paintings tend to be stark, even lonely, but with striking images that suggest more than meets the eye. Peggy Noonan recently wrote “We weren’t meant to be a Hopper painting.” Ah, but we get it, don’t we? Isn’t there primal beauty in basic colors and stark images? So it is if we are Here to See It.

Many thanks to the friend who gave me a copy of this.