Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths
Judy Kronenfeld
The Litchfield Review Press

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          In the past decade, poet Judy Kronenfeld’s elegant poems have appeared in an impressive number of journals, anthologies and two chapbooks (2000’s Disappeared Down Dark Wells, and Still Falling and 2004’s Ghost Nurseries). She has collected several of these (including what appears to be most of both chapbooks) into her newest collection, the finely-honed and mature Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths. This book should be considered a mature collection not because its poems are, in syntax, image and execution, clearly the work of an experienced artist, but because of its subject matter, namely the vicissitudes of aging: caring for elderly parents, the uncertainty of an irregular mole, the contemplation of death as a near and therefore very real eventuality, instead of the distant abstraction it seems to be for those of us in our twenties and thirties. The fifty-two poems in Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths are the work of a woman in middle age with an eye to 70 or 80, who has become by virtue of her years and experiences Death’s intimate. There is much to do with acceptance in Kronenfeld’s poetry—of age, of illness and infirmness, of the grave and also of the joys that come between. There is also something necessary and quietly urgent which older readers will likely recognize as the legacy of living long enough, and younger readers take note of as something to be studied.

          Kronenfeld illustrates beautifully the division between experience and youthful naiveté in “The Emperor and Empress of Ice Cream,” which plays off Wallace Stevens’s 1922 poem, “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (a poem that, somewhat ironically in the context of Kronenfeld’s work, discusses the death of an elderly woman and the fantastical preparations for her wake). In this poem the speaker—a teacher like Kronenfeld herself—discusses Stevens’s poem with a class of university freshmen as two of them, a lazy couple who have come to class straight from bed, sniggeringly read double entendre into such lines as “if her horny feet protrude.” As she patiently corrects them, the speaker considers the shortness of both her life and those of her giggling students.

I flip the page of the anthology and picture
minutes flipping like the rolodex
in my old clock-radio, days
ripped from the calendar.
The numbers tumble —2-0-4-3
and I’m gone (unless become some
salted centenarian sibyl),
2-0-8-0 pouf! they’re gone, wedded
to me in the democracy of the dead.

...

The lucent phrases briefly live,
flaring up,
then out, like sectors
on a circuit board,

as I sing on, before the drowsy
Emperor and Empress,
and all the lunch-sated assembled court—

          However, the importance given here to “The Emperor and Empress of Ice Cream’s” in Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths may be a young reviewer’s fancy, for Kronenfeld’s collection deals only tangentially with the vanity of youth. Its main focus is on the approaching darkness, the light of the title, lowering in diminished sevenths.

          Many of Kronenfeld’s poems here center upon the deaths of her mother and later her father (to whom the book is dedicated). Her mother, who predeceased her father, is discussed at length in the book’s sections “Ghost Nurseries” and “Tonight, the Dead.” Likewise Kronenfeld devotes the poems in “Unravelings” to her father’s decline from Alzheimer’s.

          In poems such as “Institutional,” “Visiting Hour,” “The Long and Short of Memory,” “In the Reminiscence Wing” and “After a Month Spent Visiting the Nursing Home,” Kronenfeld catalogues the emotional, spiritual and (most often) hospital duties a daughter undertakes for parents becoming gradually infirm with reserve, sympathy and even at times a little humor (an unintentional joke her father plays in “Alzheimer’s, Interrupted” is both charming and funny in a way that feels honest and respectful). There is no youthful horror of the tomb here, only mature observation and grief observed quietly, as in “Chrysalis” (here reproduced in full), the final poem in the “Ghost Nurseries” section. Her observations move from her mother’s remains to the brevity of life, and the ways in which death can even cloud memory.

An invisible visitor slipped in
and led you away,
as we closed ranks around your bed,
thinking at last you’re sleeping,
at last some sleep

After we were shouted out in a swirl of white,
the grenade of tears bursting in my chest,
I came back briefly to admire
his clean work: just your chrysalis
on the bed, like a drained glass
left on a hotel room table

Now I send memory to the well
with its cup of bone
wanting to fill it to the brim
but the pump is frozen
and the water is stone

First you’re not there
sitting on the couch
then the couch is gone
the room
the house

          As Kronenfeld observes, the realities of aging and the inevitability of death can even color memories of childhood, a time when death typically seems so distant as to be unreal. The poet explores this phenomenon in pieces such as “Our Little Life,” “Bronx-Gemeinschaft-Street-Hush Memory” and “Summer Autumnal,” which prefaces youthful memories of long summers at gabled Victorian vacation houses, of playing doctor, of parents who seemed eternally young and strong with this chilly note:

I can barely remember the porch,
the dusty hydrangeas crisping
brown at the edges—

          Of course, no study of the way Kronenfeld discusses time, memory and age in Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths would be complete without mentioning this work’s obvious and essential Jewishness. Indeed, to ignore the poet’s cultural background and the way it influences the poems in this collection would be to ignore much of the beauty in this collection—indeed, to gut the book of much of its meaning.

          Many of the poems in Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths deal explicitly not only with growing up and living in a Jewish community (such as the one portrayed in “Bronx-Gemeinschaft-Street-Hush Memory”), but also with the importance placed upon memory in this particular culture and religion. Indeed poems like “Tonight, the Dead” and “Names of My Mother’s Friends” are the literary equivalent of placing stones upon grave markers, as this selection from the latter piece illustrates:

They rumbled their shopping carts
over cracked sidewalks, met in the
vegetable store by the dank potatoes,
cluck-clucked over this one’s
sunken-cheeked husband, that one’s
sneaky son, while the chickens
they chose were plucked;
                                         grew
widowed, cancerous, forgot which was
the meat fork, which the dairy,
lost teeth and didn’t care, moved
out of and into a home,
                                         and their
names have been sent down to the dark,
withdrawn from circulation, with hers
they have gone out like lights,
but they are still fragrant
as lace handkerchiefs taken
from a sachet-scented drawer—
Oh Stella, Dora, Ida, Gertie, Pearl, oh Rose.

          There are poems here that praise the beauty of Yiddish (“Voiced and Unvoiced: Resumed Litany for All Language”), poems that discuss the immigrant experience of Jews fleeing the Holocaust (“Decorum: An Immigrant Elegy”) and poems that revel in Passover, as celebrated in our tumultuous times when the Jewish Diaspora has been added to by American syncretism, multiculturalism and intermarriage.

          Indeed, the closing lines of the poem “Company is Coming! Company is Coming!” provide a fitting summary of the entire collection.

Oh, all you new ghosts crowding around
my shoulders, who wanted nothing more
than to sit at your families’ tables,
come in, too. We are
living. Help us
think of you.

          Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths is a strong collection not only because Kronenfeld can surprise and awe with an unusual turn of language or a stark metaphor, but also because she speaks of aging and dying—which many view as unpleasant and too terrifying to consider—honestly and straightforwardly. Older readers will likely find much comfort and sympathy in her words, and even we foolhardy young Emperors and Empresses of Ice Cream cannot help but be impressed by Kronenfeld’s technique and fearlessness.