How to Sing for Money

In her new collection, poet Connie Wanek reflects on the recent death of her mother, continues the series of Mrs. God poems that enlivened her previous collection, Consider the Lilies, and ensnares us in the kind of whimsical meandering the deeper significance of which often strikes us only after the fact. In "Tennis Lessons," for example, she relates the various instructions being given by the "pro," simple yet as difficult as Zen. The poem arrives at a hilarious conclusion: "Ideally, after the lesson I could be someone else altogether." In another poem an old friend appears in the poet's dreams to tell her she's started smoking again--something she hadn't dared to do when she was alive. Many of the poems focus on Wanek's mother, who loved free ball-point pens and was adept at administering medicine to her children--you could tell how well it was working by how much it hurt. There are gentle words, too, about her father, a soldier in his youth, who chose to be buried in a distant cemetery with his comrades rather than close to home, near his family. Well, it was free. Along with the rich detail and understated humor, there's a subtlety and ease in these lines that's rare. Wanek is confident that we'll catch her drift.