We are more than just this, Michael Favala Goldman’s eighth poetry collection, draws inspiration from Danish literary historian/poet Knud Sørensen (1928-2022), who admonished readers to examine where they come from and to be elevated by the efforts of who came before, so we can do justice to them, to ourselves, and to our collective future. The poems in this collection similarly draw us from our self-centered attention to appearances, into fleeting joy and suffering, transformed by stories and wisdom.
“Anyone can create/the future,” Goldman writes. “Creating the present/is an entirely/different matter.” With irony and familiar scenery, these poems are steeped in the universal conflict inherent in being human with regard to time and inheritance. “There is no real reason/for anything, except what/came before and maybe/
what comes after..”
The reader will recognize mundane domestic scenes of family holidays, cooking, and childhood rites of passage as portals into the subconscious, which repeatedly dredge up barriers to belonging. From “Late in the afternoon”: “reality thunders on/ to the suppressed surprise/ of almost everyone.”
In addition to these meditations on belonging to one’s own life, We are more than just this holds numerous reflections on war and peace: “Rubble and tanks/are just dead things.//It’s the life/that gets you.” And on our connection with Nature, “The heart dancing in its cage/has its own little gravity, its/own little lightning.”
And finally, reconciliation to mystery: “The beauty is a problem/ I will not solve in this lifetime.”
