A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln
by Eve Wood
Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99
Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who represents the very heart of our onetime democracy and the towering soul of this once-revered nation: Abraham Lincoln. A Cadence for Redemption is a work of narrative brilliance, the arc and architecture of which is seemingly upheld by the merest of lyrical tentpoles – that, in all their brevity, of the poems themselves. Yet the ideas across the collection, and the emotive carry in each one of these songs of love, songs of longing and loss, are as equally affecting as they are disquieting; they are as well, in their grand sum, entirely profound.
If you’re seeking to recalibrate your own internal compass on what it means to be a ‘good person’ or, conversely, are in search of sound template for our next generation of elected leaders, A Cadence for Redemption is a singular point of onset, for its terrains are of the highest bearings, its lyricism of heartsome beauty, its imagination of distinct wonder. It is, in other words, an altogether fine book of poetry for this fraught moment of our now. – C von Hassett
Below are three excerpts from A Cadence for Redemption, courtesy of Eve Wood.
3:34 PM, April 14, 1865
To Lydia Bixby
(upon losing five of her sons in the war)
I am afraid only the trees
Stood witness to the falling
Of each of your boys,
Taking the field as they did,
Young lions laying down
Their soft heads in the grass.
But I’ve heard word from the flowering dogwood
And the cypress as well
That the battle-worn birds
Flew so low and into the fray,
They stole each boy’s final breath
And made it their own
To bear it away on the wind.
It’s true. I wasn’t there,
And who would trust the knowledge of trees?
But step outside
On any windswept day
And make their breath
Your own.
.
4:42 PM, April 14, 1865
On What It Means to Be President
Imagine an invisible thread that extends
From the center of your chest
Out into the hearts
Of every man, woman and child,
Weaving a diaspora of intersecting lives.
Imagine the responsibility of trying
To give voice
To that formless human yearning,
Knowing each person’s life is a song,
A specific cadence for redemption,
And it is your job to optimize
The circumstance by which they might
Be heard, if not with their own language,
Then by yours.
Imagine attempting to apprehend
The intricacies of human desire,
The whispered longings
Of thirty million, then
Channel those longings
Through your own feeble heart
In the hopes they might one day
Feel recognized.
.
November 7, 1865
Stealing Lincoln
Eleven years and five minutes from today,
They will try to lift
My narrow bones from the crypt
Where for too long those walls kept me
Safe.
Only a man who forges counterfeit nickels
Could presume such extravagance,
And isn’t a bullet to the back of the skull enough
To satisfy the slavish interests of men?
Really, what is left for us if a man can plot
The theft of another man’s body,
And not understand
He has desecrated,
Not only the sacred bones of the dead,
But his own feeble soul?
. . .
.
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