London Grip Poetry Review – Karen Warinsky

 

Poetry review – BEAUTY & ASHES: Nancy Murphy admires Karen Warinsky’s poems both for their honesty and for their hopefulness

 

Beauty & Ashes
Karen Warinsky
Kelsay Books, June 2025
ISBN 978-1639807277
112 pp   $23

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” This is the apt Maya Angelou quote with which poet Karen Warinsky opens her third full length poetry collection, Beauty & Ashes. What follows are poems that celebrate the joyful memories of a full life but also share the accumulating griefs and losses with us. They then show us how to reconcile both and retain hope in the future. It turns out that gratitude and an embrace of the natural world are key to her survival of spirit. As she says further in the opening, “…like everyone, I live with beauty and ashes.” But not everyone lights up the path forward like she does.

The work is organized around the four seasons which becomes a fitting vehicle for this exploration. She invites us in with lush Summer first, then moves to the colder seasons, finally ending with the optimism and brightness of Spring. But each season has its own color and rhythm as well as dark and light moments and memories. She gives us the whole picture. Her style is gently accessible with direct language, yet full of adept observation and imagery too. In her skillful hands, we take comfort in the way the world keeps spinning and renewing itself.

The first poem, “A Greeting,” opens with “Summer, my love / I succumb…” and ends with “Kick off those shoes and dance!” Other lines repeat the soft ’s’ sounds with “smooth stone,” “popsicle” and “Solstice.”

In “Morning Glories and Lace” we are uplifted with this delicate description:

 	Queen Anne’s Lace is also there
	a flower ballet, all adagio, 
	a positioned, patterned perfection. 
	I touch its holy head joining nature.

The author captures the moments when all is right in the world among friends. She writes in “Tonight is a Poem,”

	safe for the moment
	money in our pockets
	beer on the table
	…
        tonight 
	is a poem
	and I want it	
	to write all over me.

There are poems in this summer section about relatives who have passed but who add meaning to her life. In the touching, “Elegy for Pearl,” she writes as follows:

	Great Grandma’s house in still there amid the ruin.
	I picked some violets from the yard, 
 	…
        laid them on her stone, whispered, 
	“We remember you.”

Warinsky also addresses the changes and challenges of aging in “New Category” and compassionately ends with these lines:

	keep my hands warm and open,
	held out for a friendly shake or a desperate grasp,
	ready to help all who dare enter
	this new category with me.

Warinsky introduces her daughter at a pivotal time in her life in “Like Condensed Milk.” She longingly describes, “scenes of your life…when nothing happened to you without me” and then, “This year you will marry / and time is now condensed milk / a thick syrupy concoction / all excess boiled away.”

The final poem in Summer prepares us for the next phase. In “Summer Dross,” she writes:

        I pull death from the plants, 
	fresh green revealed under what’s expired;
	short summer life.

And later,

        …I step back,
         concentrate on all that’s alive.

 

The Fall section opens with “Orange Tunnel,” and images of fall colors as the poet escapes the boredom and pressure of a job with a journey through the autumn leaves as “protection” and “freedom.” We see how she uses the natural world as a place for healing and regeneration.

Further along, the author writes about sorrow over the state of the world in this ending passage from “This Ruined Garden.” It also foretells her theme of resilience that will come later with Spring.

      But now, as fall begins and we tumble into the year’s end
      I poke around in this ruined garden,
      …
      just another half-hearted distraction from a troubled world,
      …
     a world that each spring brings us a promise
     we cannot refuse.

Winter celebrates the beauty of snow even if it sometimes makes Warinsky fear that it will bury her. In “Winter Poems” she describes how “Everything turned to cupcakes, white and frosted over / barrels and branches, parapets and stones.” She later describes in “Snow Globe,” the sense of digging out and wandering as if in a “snow globe, / t his beautiful treachery.” There is also the pull to lethargy because of feeling overwhelmed by both the season itself and by the current political landscape and endless wars.

Woven among the seasons are narrative poems recollecting and imagining the poet’s life. She writes about a Vietnam-haunted first husband in “When I think of Utah.” Another poem, “Moonlight Becomes Her” tells a story of a woman who longs to be the moon, reflecting a man’s glories back to the world. She then surprises with, “violence erupted from you, / I left….Later I learned most women stay.” She is wise enough to see that “I could be my own star /my own burning luminary.” It is this spirit of strength and survival that keeps surfacing in her work. She looks back at a younger self from the point of view of mature insights.

A poem appearing in Winter gives us a hint of the way seasonal splendor can map our own moods and pull us forward. “Toward the Horizon,” opens with this description:

      A slant of winter sunlight tinged the trees
      cast its rose gold stream across our patch of woods
      the beam low in the morning sky
      a searchlight along the cold ground   

Later in the poem, the narrator wants to “go back inside and hide,” from the ills of the world –Covid and all that came after it. Yet in her indomitable way, she ends with this bright note:

	but the birds have flown to the horizon,
        summoning the dawn,
        and their song is a key unlocking despair.
        Listen!  They are singing now.

Spring arrives with an impatience that comes when you live in a place with long winters like her current residence in Connecticut.. Once the last ice clumps have been stamped out, there is room for gratitude and kindnesses. She encourages us in this poem “Intention” with these words: “We are water. / Speak kindly, send solace.”

In “Dent-de-Lion,” we get the full force of Warinsky’s message. Writing about the dandelion, from the French Dent-de-lion, teeth of the lion, she describes it as,

	Sunshine burst
	a moon and stars
	a map of the cosmos
	in seed and stem.

	Hold in your hand its lions’ teeth
	to renew you in spring, 
	courage to continue	

Warinsky lets us into her life and reflects on where she has been and how she has not been reduced by what she has experienced. She is committed to keeping faith and hoping for a better world and is uplifted by the natural world around her. By sharing her words with us in all their Beauty & Ashes, she inspires us to dare to do the same.

Nancy Murphy is the author of the poetry chapbook “The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence” with Gyroscope Press (2022). She was the winner of the Aurora Poetry contest in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The Baltimore Review, SWWIM, Sheila-Na-Gig, glassworks, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. www.nancymurphywriter.com