Sherry Chandler

Second Opinion

Leatha Kendrick writes poetry of such authority that she can tackle the big subjects, from breast cancer to war, without ever seeming shrill or off center.

If I may be allowed an odd sort of comparison, it’s like what I was saying earlier about Sidney Poitier. Poitier can portray characters who are angry or wounded, he may see great trouble and experience great pain, but he is an actor of such self-possession and surety, such innate dignity, that you never doubt but that the core of his person is honest and true.

Leatha Kendrick’s poetry is like that: centered and true at the core.

I am a poet known for edginess. People seem to like a certain kind of assertiveness. They mistake it for courage. In Second Opinion (David Robert Books, 2008), Kendrick moves beyond mere edginess to the great grief that lies behind it. Though she can do edgy with the best of ‘em.

Take this passage from “No Reason” [p. 10]

…
Here we all are hanging
our wounds out to dry, trying to speak
truth to power, as the Quakers say,
while the world goes on,
being exactly what it is.
Somewhere an artist is trying to top Alba,
the green neon rabbit, coaxing some genetic designer
into inserting a jellyfish’s
phosphorescence
into, perhaps, a peacock this time,
and somewhere else men sit
in solitary cages, making poetry to stay sane, writing
with a cracked thumbnail on anything soft, and
women sit by hospital beds
for months,
years, filled with longing

for the ordinary. A boy
learns to build a bomb and a young man learns
to bathe his new baby. They each know
how to laugh. Sometimes
they’re happy
for no reason at all.

This poem moves in and out from the personal to the political, showing that they are all part of the same thing, even the fiddling with life for commercial purposes, and showing it all to us with a great tenderness.

And underlying Kendrick’s worldview is an irrepressible sense of humor, a sense of free play that Stephen Nachmanovitch calls “the imp.” So from “Hey Bud:”

pal comrade life
waiting in its sheath for time
to pull it out pet sweetie
doll you called me while
I smiled and hated it
kewpie barbie raggedy
ann baby baby I’m not your bud curled
leaflet blossom bit tucked in under
your cozy armpit…
my bestbudloverfriend oh
that sweet soil that is flesh that
penis budtip root unfurling hey… [p. 8]

The poems in Second Opinion are mostly written in a crisp free verse, though many have what Roethke would maybe recognize as “the ghost … of blank verse behind what is written,” but Kendrick makes the occasional foray into received forms (”Recycled,” a sestina, “Ghazal for the State of the Union”) and even, in “The Calculus of a Cracked Cup,” a shaped poem. Kendrick is comfortable with experimentation, with what one might call stretching her poetic wings.

In her Courier-Journal review of Second Opinion, George Ella Lyon mentions that Leatha Kendrick was told she had breast cancer almost exactly one year before the disaster that we call 9/11. Two such events in proximity would daunt even the strongest of us. And while I would not say that Kendrick was undaunted, in Second Opinion she looks at both of these events without flinching.

In the title poem, Kendrick shows herself in the radiology waiting room, flanked by her three daughters, and in this place of anxious waiting, they are laughing:

The receptionist gives us a hard look when we laugh.
We’re linked, silvery with a happiness
glinting out even in this waiting place.
I finger the necklace I’ve just bought, touch
the curative moonstone, murmuring “hope”—
I want to believe in sudden remission,
in some way to avert what we are certainly
headed for. What I can believe in
is the healing of their fingers laced through mine.

This is the essence of Leatha Kendrick. She tells us we can face disaster with joy and laced fingers. She is like Naomi Nye in her generosity of spirit.

At Windows Toward the World, Helen Losse featured this quote from Henry Nouwen:

Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not “How can we hide our wounds?” so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but “How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?” When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.

Kendrick’s poetry work offers her wounds in our service.

1. Full Moon with Ground Mist
2. Poets for Peace. Five Years in Iraq
3. A fun reading
4. Leatha Kendrick on WEKU-FM
5. Raccoons in the Attic

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