In her poem, “The Sewing Machine,” Patricia Caspers writes, “I have to reach in/with both hands to pull out the weight of the thing.” In her latest collection, Some Flawed Magic, Caspers examines the weightiest of all things: family, death, forgiveness. As I was reading this masterful book, I thought of a line from Rilke’s poem “The Neighbor,” which ends with, “Life is infinitely heavier/than the heaviness of all things.” Caspers’ poems are dense with details of things—both physical and emotional—laid out with poetic and mathematical precision.

The first section, “Life with Fever,” is a catalogue of “things.” Here, we are introduced to the speaker’s early, rural life surrounded by Nana Ivy, Pap James, Uncle Mike, Earl the Pig, the cow brought to slaughter, Aunt Sue who “severed/her pinky toe with a fat can of stewed tomatoes.” Loss and trauma are a part of this world as well. “Dead Letters” recounts a never-ending search for an uncle killed in Vietnam and “Double Negative” addresses the loss of a patois that sounds uneducated, poor. Caspers weaves family trauma and the loss of words in “Pacific Tide Pools, July,” when time is also added into the equation: “Before Grandma’s boyfriend took the girl cousins for a long ride in the country./Before no one believed what happened there.”

In the book’s second section, “Some Flawed Magic,” Caspers continues to bend time in a search for a different Father narrative. In “Downtown Walk, April,” she writes, “Nineteen and your dad is alive, though you don’t speak,/time is still a puppy leashed to a parking meter.” Caspers presents the Father in all his iterations in “Father As,” where he is a rooster, a salesman, futurism, false awakening. I loved the incantatory feel of this middle section, which employs all our senses and sensibilities. Caspers’ use of the color yellow—golden comet, yolky tempera, fried eggs, a bride who never wears yellow—conjures unreality, death, and gives a rich eeriness to the section. Caspers deliciously entwines her attention to detail with this color in “Double Yellow” where we meet Missy, whose pupil “was the shape of Florida.” This detail is the artistry of this writer who, like E.B. White, tries her hand 

at some flawed magic,

weaving another world

in which the dead

are not dead

but dancing.

The final section, “What It’s Important To Know,” returns to the earthiness of the first part. The poems are both emotionally and geographically expansive, spanning the country, “my western life//on New England walls,” and back again, to home. Here, the Father is the father of the speaker’s child. “In defiance,” Caspers writes, “you look so like him,/when you blame me for the way I love.” The poet has performed magic, and has returned, illuminated: 

What is important to know?

The mother alligator will crack the shell

of her hatchling just so

and in the damp cavern of her jaws

carry her glimmer slip of reptile tenderly

to the water’s edge. 

Some Flawed Magic is a book of spells and of family I will return to many times. “This is not grief,” Caspers writes, “but its sister perhaps,/the goodbye of growing up.” These poems are intense in their hearts, breathtaking in their scope, creating an arc of a life, “a handed down china dish/its blue pattern of birds flying from your hand.”

November, 2021