Miriam Kotzin's 'The Body's Bride'

The Body's Bride is Miriam Kotzin's fourth collection of verse, and it shows a strong and mature poet at the height of her powers.

Kotzin (my faculty colleague at Drexel University) works mostly in traditional forms. Her meters scan; her lines most often rhyme. She deploys such virtuoso forms as the villanelle with ease. She might be grouped among the so-called New Formalists associated with Dana Gioia, Rachel Hadas and others, though that's an academic issue that will be of little interest to the general reader.

(One hopes there is such a thing as a general reader of poetry, but that's another issue.)

Kotzin is aware that formal verse is largely out of favor. Generations of poets now have scoffed at Joyce Kilmer's notorious couplet, "I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree," both for its sing-song rhyme and the easeful sentiment, and in taking on these very lines "that some love well and some scorn worse," as Kotzin puts it in Rest-Stop Fame, she tackles the question directly if wryly, and manages an homage to poor Kilmer, whose name is now perhaps best known among Philadelphians as a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike.

Similarly, in How to Write a Sustainable Love Poem, Kotzin begins, "Of course you'll want to write in free / verse," before continuing the poem in rhyme.

Distressed poetry students

And in Villanelle Villainess, she writes amusingly of the "distress" experienced by students whom she asked to write a villanelle in her poetry class. The form is, of course, a villanelle itself, which features a strict rhyme scheme together with patterned repetitions of whole lines, and it's a perfectly turned example.

All of this will doubtless matter little if at all to our suppositional general reader. What matters much more is the very fine poet behind the craft. More simply said, you experience Kotzin's poems first, and note their construction after.

The Body's Bride is tautly unified throughout around the central theme and image of the female body in all the stages and conditions of life, of which the bridal moment is, classically, the most significant.

Frost and hard survival

In Nuptial, the book's opening poem, Kotzin figures an old pear tree as "a brazen backyard bride without a groom"— that is, as a bride who appears jilted yet proud, and unafraid to blossom. Across the yard, a neighbor in Spring Cleaning waves a greeting as she welcomes the new season, herself a part of it; and this image, too, is part of the poet's own self-projection as a form flowing with and into nature, and finding renewal.

Nature itself, the backdrop to the bridal figure as well as its ultimate essence, appears strongly in the book's first section, "The Backyard Bride." But a darker sense of limitation and mortality emerges as the sequence progresses, and in Snowbound, Kotzin remembers the season of frost and hard survival that's also part of the year's cycle: "This is what I know: where to hide / and creep as if my song were gone."

The book's central section (which provides its overall title), "The Body's Bride," shows a keen and playful wit, with an undertow of erotic challenge: "Claim the penis mightier than the sword? / My darling, pending proof, I am not stirred" (in How to Write a Sustainable Love Poem).

Bare-breasted dancers

Kotzin also offers riffs on Keats, Dickinson, and Stevens. In The Gale (after Winslow Homer), the image of the female figure returns, exposed to storm and yet heraldic, riding out the worst that life and weather can throw at her.

This theme is contrasted, in Candle Dancers, with Emil Nolde's image of ecstatic South Sea dancers, their breasts exposed and their "faces/ smeared with passion," and then again with Whistler's mother, in which the sitter complains of being portrayed as an Arrangement in Grey and Black after a lifetime of vigor and hard industry.

The poems turn tougher and bleaker in the concluding section, "The Oldest Bride." That bride of course is Eve, but also the perdurable pear tree of Nuptial, and finally Kotzin herself, speaking frankly of erotic fulfillment in The Garden but also of the cheats of failed union in The Marriage.

Innocence and terror

A note of betrayal reverberates in the superb villanelle Thundergust, in which the repeated lines grow darker and darker with their burden of menace. Outright terror emerges in The Bait and The Oldest Bride, and the worst of all betrayals— that of innocence— surfaces in the book's penultimate poem, The Listener, which refigures the image of the child thrust out violently in Thundergust.

Is it the poet herself who stands at the paired parental graves in the final poem, Cemetery, holding a stone of remembrance in each hand? These final poems possess a fearsome intensity, yet checked and molded by their grace of form.

"I wait for stronger light," Kotzin writes in Palette, a poem about the giving of form. Her own light, to judge by The Body's Bride, is strong and true.