By Jim Kates

Many of the poems in this new collection take in the world through a distinctively painterly eye for scenes and sketches.

Sky of Sudden Changes by Cornelia Veenendaal. BlazeVOX [books], 98 pages, $18

In 1977, Cornelia Veenendaal, one of the founding members of the pioneering women’s collective Alice James Books, based in Boston, inscribed a collection of hers for a reader, “remembering the old days.” I don’t think either she or the reader could have imagined that she would be publishing a new book, forty-eight years later, after she had passed her hundredth birthday, in which she is still remembering the old days and making new memories.

The wide-ranging poems in Sky of Sudden Changes move the reader from the Boston of those old days to the North Country of New Hampshire of these days, alongside deep, “ekphrastic” exchanges with writers and plastic artists from all over the world.

“Ekphrasis,” a very modern excavation from Platonic Greek, where the term meant the detailed description of a work of art, may be one of the ugliest-sounding words in the English language. But the word represents something essential: conversation among the muses. A writer looks at another work of art and responds to it. Veenendaal has always valued this process, and she uses the word for the last of four sections in Sky of Sudden Changes. “I am new paper for the artist’s work,” she wrote prophetically long ago, and many of the poems in this new book, not just in those that are explicitly ekphrastic poems, take in the world through a distinctively painterly eye for scenes and sketches:

Walking past the skaters,
expecting the unlocked door,
how could I have known then

that the falling light —
by which my mother was ironing
a shirt she’d hang to dry in the freezing air . . . .

— that the sky washed with rose light,
would stay with me all my life?

The last section of Sky of Sudden Changes invokes Van Gogh, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, George Stubbs, and “the vision of a young Chinese peasant / when she closed her eyes after a day’s work,” among others. Overall, more than a dozen poets and composers are woven in and out of the poems..

Veenendaal’s territory remains what it has always been — Boston and points north, with occasional visits to more distant locations. Her perspective is historical. In “The Adventure” the speaker is seeing

through the children’s eyes, and they
were seeing for the first time what we thought we
knew, blessed with the grace of deepsea creatures,
we went all the way back along roads of stop and go,
and the Big Dig worked on an underwater tunnel.

Perhaps I am alone in hearing here a response to Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” in which “The old South Boston Aquarium stands / in a Sahara of snow.” The garage under the Boston Common was the Big Dig of its time, and “a savage servility / slides by on grease.” In contrast, Veenendaal’s vision is far more summery, and there is very much right with her world:

What will I take with me from our world?
Visions of dandelions springing
where limestone weathers.

The most self-consciously “poetic” phrase in the whole book is its title, and perhaps it is also the most deceptive, because most of the poems are concerned with subtle changes stretching over the decades rather than sudden ones. Generally, Veenendaal deploys down-to-earth language with the confidence of long usage. She has no fear of turning an adjective into a verb — “a Japanese maple / vermilions the rain-pebbled windowpane” — but she has no need to. “In the Hall of Ideas words of green light / are spilling over the fountain’s edge” is not just a description of Boston’s Christian Science Mapparium, it is also the essence of this book. (It is no accident that both of these illustrative examples turn on colors. That painter’s eye again.)

“Green light” words are those of observation, acceptance, and hope, fresh life constantly regenerating old, established landscapes. And these are what  Veenendaal brings us in The Sky of Sudden Changes. As you read the book, look up, and then look down and around. You will see her everywhere, in living color.

J. Kates is a poet, feature journalist, and reviewer, literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a nonprofit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. His latest book of poetry is Places of Permanent Shade (Accents Publishing) and his newest translation is Sixty Years Selected Poems: 1957-2017, the works of the Russian poet Mikhail Yeryomin.