Her Joy Becomes by Andrea Potos

Through the dancing poppies stole a breeze, most softly lulling to my soul.
– John Keats

A brown-haired child in a red-petal dress twirls away from the viewer through a blur of poppies: one glance at the newest book of poetry from Andrea Potos, Her Joy Becomes, reveals a portal into this poet’s world.

Beloveds, memory, time swirl and whisper around and through these lovely poems like air.

Swept inside on the heels of the child, we actually meet her in the book’s first poem. The poet is brushing and braiding her daughter’s long brown hair in front of the bathroom mirror:

…stray strands
nestle in the brush, and because
nothing of beauty is ever wasted,
I pull them out,
stand on the porch and let them fly.

It is a powerful image of the poet: one who notices, cherishes, and elevates strands of beauty within ordinary objects and ordinary acts, so that they may fly. It is also a powerful image of the love-seeped grief that accompanies motherhood. Daily we send our child off to school, knowing that one day the child will fly away.

Nothing of beauty is ever wasted.

In poem after poem Potos notices and pulls out the underpinnings of dailiness, fleeting Spots of Time, and thin-place moments when there is no time, / only now, / the true eternal. She then weaves the strands into light-filled odes of poems that lift up and preserve a tactile and braided world. From “After the Evening Lecture on Insight Meditation:”

            I came home to my husband,
            twirled in my long skirt
            beside the still-cluttered kitchen sink,
            while in the living room our daughter
            was up way past bedtime.
            I had no urge to scold anyone.
            She scurried to her piano;
            I heard her hands
            release the Ode to Joy.

In this collection, as in previous books, Potos’s poems commune with muses of her family, personal and literary. Here the muses include her Greek grandmother, mother, daughter, and partner (mainly in Part One), as well as the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Dorothy Wordsworth (William’s sister), John Keats, John Donne, Renoir, and Matisse (mainly in Part Two). When I read “Three Acorns from Emily’s Yard,” I was reminded of a walnut that has lived on my desk for eight years (from the yard of another luminary):

            I pocketed them that day
            the tour guide was not looking.
            I nodded to myself that she
            would not mind for me to hold
            in my palm and carry home
            such Possibility.

Her Joy Becomes is a soulful collection of fifty-seven poems that find praise, even in invisible molecules of ordinary air. In a world in dire need of cherishing, the voice and craft of Andrea Potos is never wasted.

Ingrid Andersson is the author of Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife (Holy Cow! Press, 2022). Andersson’s writing has been published in About Place Journal, ArsMedica, Conduit, Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine, Literary Mama, Midwest Review, Minerva Rising, Plant-Human Quarterly, the Progressive Magazine, and elsewhere. Andersson writes and midwifes in Madison, WI.