An Overdose of Meditation

Irene Mitchell’s latest book of poetry, An Overdose of Meditation, is perhaps her most accessible and personal. Her ninth collection explores changes in the world and in herself, using her own clear direct voice, eschewing ambiguous metaphors, unwieldy grammatical constructions, or flimsy personas.

Mitchell ponders the meaning and value of life’s moments and memories, and implicitly invites readers to use her poems as a springboard for their own personal explorations. In “Strife Over Trifles,” she sets the stage with an image of the landscape she will venture into at the beginning of our journey:

Clamshell gray, beak yellow.
Hard to tell this gull from that
for the shoreline is foreign in fog,
an indistinct scene of orts and fragments.

There she uncovers no great truths, but rather “a teasing glitter, a vague priority…which insinuates something else.” Similar perhaps to life, the collection is about the journey and the desire for illumination, rather than the epiphany itself. Mitchell’s heuristics uphold a unique formulation that serves to guide her investigations.

It is difficult to pull “representative” lines from this collection, for the apparent simplicity and directness of the language belie the depth of each poem, the meaning of which only becomes clear after the reader reaches the last line. However, these excerpts from “Ascending,” while not meant to stand alone, demonstrate Mitchell’s style. Here she examines not only prayer but, more important, the idea of prayer and our relation to it, and with the skill and insight of a Thomas Merton:

When prayers stack up,
their original premise not quite ready
for the voyage home,
the idea of prayer
remains latent in the mind’s sphere.

In the final stanza the poet, perhaps, realizes the futility of grasping the whole, and with that comes the idea that the pattern of fragmentation brings its own comfort.

The moon went west toward the Rockies,
its light on the crags.
Had I followed it, I would have cried
for its parting from the east
and prayed for its return to calmer waters,
prayed
in a sing-song language
of casava, papaya and bits of sugar cane
which restoreth the whole.

For Mitchell, this pattern provides freedom from worry, a flat plane to visit to prolong prayer without lamentation.

In “Something Else, Please?” we see that individual moments contain the seeds for much more:

Every day is graduation day
proving that there is always something else.
At Key West, for example,
the sun goes down like a parachute.
A little renegade is running toward
his mother’s camera
in a white cotton Easter suit,
angelic to the eye. We expect him
to graduate by and by.

The stanza is crafted with the imagist eye of a William Carlos Williams and wrapped up with the offhanded wink of a Howard Nemerov.

But all in Mitchell’s collection is not introspection. The book is peppered with humor, as in “And Stands in For a Torrent of Ampersands,” in which a torrent of ands replaces what could have been a torrent of ampersands. William Blake would approve.

Given today’s publishing environment, I need to add that Mitchell’s An Overdose of Meditation is a physically beautiful book, printed on sturdy paper, rather than the seemingly ubiquitous print-on-demand offerings marred with the stamp of when and where they were “printed.” Dos Madres cares enough to invest in an actual press run. Find the book and, as Mitchell advises in her invocation to the reader, “lean back at your leisure / in a modern chair” to enjoy these poems in a quality format, for this is not a collection to hurry through.

—Alex Balogh