The Undertow

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Wit and sorrow run throughout the poems of Susan Snively's third collection. In poems about divorce, family, and travel, Snively is "a woman holding a balance" between "the little I ask for" and "the little I get", sorting "the indifference and the rage from the secret joy". Humor, sometimes directed at herself, is a source of joy in "Too Late", where Snively sorts through childhood ambitions -- ballet dancer, famous actress, nuclear physicist, singer -- to arrive at what she is, "a decent cook, / a glutton jeweled with the glaze of manners, / eager to please while pleasuring her mouth". Language and speech become the greatest source of wisdom, affection and pleasure: To love a word, "wine", for example, is to love the thingitself, as well as the occasion --voluptuous evening hour, barite friends --that stirs it into shimmer, so that reflectiontastes the same as a life without regret.In the final sequence, "The Undertow", Snively writes of the deaths of her parents, retrieving her connection with her southern upbringing in "the ancient hillbilly lament, whauunh, part curse, / part yodel, that comes out of me / past years of booklarnin'".