Red Suitcase: Poems, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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 #6.  Red Suitcase, Naomi Shihab Nye
1994, American Poets Continuum

Oh, this is... odd.  I really thought I had posted a longish review of this book last month, but it seems to have been devoured by the monsters that devour things in the ether.  Which is too bad.

It will be replaced, then, by a short-ish review now.  Naomi Shihab Nye is an American poet who lives in Texas; she was born to an American mother and a Palestinian father whose family had recently been dispossessed of their land.  This slim volume (I know -- received language, but it totally is) had been sitting on my shelf for a while.  Naomi Shihab Nye had been mentioned in a list of poets admired by some people I admire, so I brought it up to my room when the book caught my eye, and now (well, in April) I took the opportunity to read it.

I was... mildly disappointed.  I wanted to like her poems, and indeed I do like them, I enjoyed reading them while I was reading them (and this is not the case for every poet I read -- far from it).  But this work doesn't stick in my mind; I couldn't remember it later, when I tried.  I re-read a lot of the book, and still liked it, and still couldn't remember it later.  So it may be that I need, or like, or demand a more forceful poetry.  Possibly Nye is too subtle for me, or too mature.

But it is also true that much of her poetry made me feel comforted, somehow.  It made me feel a little like cool rain.  There is a lot of cool rain in April, and there are a lot of things out there that can make a person feel comforted but still don't deserve to be called art.  But this is not just chicken soup for the whatever.  Gentle rain is very valuable.