Poetry is not meant to be easy. And “That Wild Knocking,” takes us, as women, to the core of our fears. Growing old. Never the most beautiful sister. The line in the poem “Mirror Mirror” describes a kind of inevitable surrender: “I am/ glowing with whatever you want to make of me.”
Yet, in this volume, divided into sections headed by triptychs from a painting about chaos, the poet dares to enter the confusion as a way of creating an identity of desire even as our bodies betray us. Pratt, a wildlife biologist, often references animal behavior. In this way she makes our rawness natural, even mythic: “a mermaid/ in disguise.” In the poem, “Tongues,” she describes how blue whales French kiss, as do bonobo chimps: “desire hard as a cramped muscle, craved even when the pain/ is like biting down hard on your own tongue.”
References to sexuality abound in these pages, desire, longing, passion that doesn’t temper with age. In fact is magnified. The author sees it everywhere. In the poem “Love Bugs” she describes insects whose entire lives consist of copulation. She asserts: “we are all alike, flies, grasshoppers, humans.” Strength within frailty is another theme. She writes about hearing loss, forgetfulness, timidity. Yet we also find a thread of hope/help from both an elk and a stranger: “I cross between life and/ death, a visitor that braces herself to accept kindness/wherever it is offered.”
Poetry might not be easy, but the best of it is honest. These words are not so much confession as anthem. I hear a ‘yes’ somewhere in each of these verses. Does life disappoint us? Yes, of course. Are we ready to give in? Never, “because that is how/ hearts work, steadily carrying us/ on.”
–Joanne Clarkson author of Hospice House and The Fates.
That Wild Knocking, the newest poetry collection by Cynthia R. Pratt‘s, contains poems of family, poems of place, poems of rich sensuality, all in a glorious manifesting, whether gazing at a painting, a memory, or contemplating “being human.” These poems, “with each turn/of the dial of the imagination,” peel away the gauze in one unflinching poem after another, self aware and all-aware. There is tenderness, wisdom and philosophy embedded in language you might hear from a friend telling you, look, see with wonder. Inventing structures faster than reincarnation in poems linked like daisy chains of light, That Wild Knocking also has quiet, Zen-like messages grounded in the moment even as we pass swiftly through. This is poetry of being—being in the world, in the body, in the mind thinking about what it’s experiencing—all in music smooth as sunrise.
–Douglas Cole is the author of Drifter, (2025) Finishing Line Press, and The Cabin at the End of the World, (2024) Unsolicited Press.
In these poems, you will find Cynthia Pratt crossing the Duckabush River, running through a busy intersection in Cairo, opening small jewel-box-like poems about her childhood, and finding the human heart at the center of each enterprise. She has seen a lot, and you will be glad to have her record of these encounters. Her poems have it all: rhythm, music and insight, but especially the startling beauty in the small, modest details, which serve as unexpected, but very welcome, wake-up calls. Reading Cynthia Pratt‘s poems is like standing still in a quiet house as a storm rages furiously above and around you: astonished and grateful.
–Timothy Kelly is the author of Articulation, Stronger, Toccata and Fugue, and The Extremities.
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