Carolyn Hembree’s For Today is a triumph of Mississippi Delta poetry. In four tightly bound parts circling the Gulf Coast and its spirit, this daring collection weaves bittersweet threads together: eulogy for a father, christening of a child, ode to a city, immolation of the soul, commentary on what critics dub “The Tradition.” It is a book that leaves us above the sinking city: “our poems are towers I ascend.” It is a book that asks what poetry can do for us, and knows that after all, the land holds the answers: “what earth says / heart says.”
Hembree doesn’t take us to many places poets haven’t been before. We see the sonnet, we again see Chaucer, Rilke is visible in the lines, and yet, rarely has contemporary poetry been more pregnant, pavement bound, public radio perfect. Here is funk, fun, fury. Hembree shines as a link between the canon and the crucible of now. In one hand she holds the poetic canon formally and thematically close; with the other she holds her kiddo in her arm, her “scalloped sleeve.” But there is no kiddo without the dead father, there is no city without the river, there is no utopia without apocalypse. Hembree knows “Strange things happen / below sea level” and that a city below the gulf keeps certain secrets.
In For Today, disasters and ecocide linger together. Chaucer pops up during a dazzling poem, “April 2020,” though this speaker is not “big on pilgrimages.” There are so many Aprils in poetry, and it is no different with Hembree: “so many magnolia petals” that fall in spring. Because what ultimately measures Hembree’s speaker is an allegiance to the family of wonders in the Mississippi Delta. She is one of many mothers looking back and forward in time, at both offspring and ancestor, wondering when the next catastrophe will strike. The Mississippi River is always on the poet’s mind—her language bends, collapses, comes back. The silt accumulates, moves underfoot, is her mother’s foot, is her mother. In Hembree’s world, there are no cardinal directions—just the riverside and lakeside. Our speaker might be lost in the world but always knows which way to walk towards the lake or the river.
For Today is composed of four beautiful, writhing parts. Part one approaches a crown sonnet through the book’s dedication, Hembree’s child, Mamie Anne, and the memory of her father, Earle M. Hembree, Jr. These eight sonnets link the departed father and arriving daughter through dirges, some measures, names engraved on tombstones. In this invented form— slipping between a sonnet crown and a song—Hembree’s measures are the pulsing heartbeat of a book that starts with a daughter’s life and a father’s death in each hand. In the remainder of book’s nearly hundred tooth-turning pages, “Earle” and “kiddo” push-and-pull Hembree’s speaker into the abyss and the light, between despair and fresh air in such movement, such grace.
Part two is a series of ebullient forms: fantasias, prayers, nocturnes, la dictée. The final section begins with a francophile nod for what is spoken, a form borrowed and made. Here, in prose poems and tercets, Hembree’s book continues to grapple with vitality—going so far to question why we’re on earth, “why does god make us eat.”
Local troubles become broader catastrophes in part three. “August 29, 2005” and “April 2020” cement themselves as bookended tragedies for the speaker. Katrina and Covid, those natural events that made life so unnatural. Connecting these two poems are five haiku, all on one abundant page: “roux so dark / it perfumes our street / knock knock.”
The book's final section is the extended, nearly 50-page title poem, For Today. Again, with miraculous dexterity and wit, Hembree reinvents the rules she has made for her own book: a playful eulogy, a tragic ecstasy, funktasia with line breaks and the Mississippi overflowing. “For Today” weaves the refrain “[poetry is not a memoir]” into reflections, fixed and unfixed form, and appraisals of the body. In a book dedicated to the deceased paternal past and the rising child, the long poem's title centers the now—as if the past and future are only worth worrying about if we can also live for them today.
When Hembree’s speaker insists that “[poetry is not a memoir]” she insists it must be something else—poetry is a haiku, a hot summer day, a fixed form that cannot be fixed, no matter how many people insist poetry is a memoir. Poetry insists on one thing, and that is life being too much. Like Lake Pontchartrain, a prominent figure and body of water in the book, this will all boil over and wash us away. We are all the “golden retriever in the black marsh rotting.” We are all babies or corpses, we are all trying to raise the dead. To read Hembree’s For Today is to deeply feel the singular and universal lightness of being felt for “my child, mamie anne / and to the memory of my father, Earle M. Hembree, Jr.” A book for both the previous generation and the one to come, a poetics that exists in no time but the one in which it is needed.
“Allez-allez!” In French, Hembree rushes us along. Back to the colonies. Back to the swamp. Back to the place of postcards, the New Orleans of tourists is washed away, to “the river that spills over walls into dreams.”