Tiny Extravaganzas by Diane Mehta Review by Catherine McNulty

Tiny Extravaganzas by Diane Mehta

Review by Catherine McNulty

Publisher: Arrowsmith Press

Publication Date: October 15, 2023

ISBN: 979-8987924112

Pages: 136

Diane Mehta’s bold new collection of poetry, Tiny Extravaganzas, opens with a sharp salvo: “You have to lose all beginnings to know where the story / really begins, all the wandering by accident or design / a way to find your tongue…” Beginnings, Mehta knows, are intoxicating with possibility and expectation. But across the collection, Mehta is less invested in beginnings—or parsing where things begin—than she is with the long middle and the feeling of displacement. “I am young to be this old, too old to be this young,” she writes in “Ode to Patrick Kearns, Funeral Director of the Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home in Queens.”  It’s here—middle age, middle of life, the rich and messy marrow of it—that Mehta’s mien sharpens. She’s picking through life and casting her eyes backward and toward the future, not to find the origin but to make meaning from what she has collected and carried with her. This book is as much a poetry collection as it is an accounting.

“Life is slipperier than I think,” Mehta observes in “Twenty-Year Anniversary.” Mehta pays close attention to the slips, the way time goes, how easy it is to be lost. She invokes another lost, middle of life traveler in “The Haunted House and I Walk to the Cemetery, After Reverdy”: “We fall in step on the purgatorial middle ridge”—who but Dante, the literary forebear of all who are adrift well into the journey of life? Later in that same poem, she quotes Dante quoting Virgil: “‘So let the quia suffice you, human species!’” In this moment, Virgil has lost patience with Dante’s many questions and unleashes the favored conjunction of parents and authority figures everywhere: because. There is no reason. In his journey, Dante expected a straightforward path to lead him through the woods and through life. Mehta has no such delusions. The lostness, the moments that can’t be planned for, that is life.

Nowhere are these moments of lost and found and unforeseen more apparent than the longest poem in the book. At five pages, “There Was a Place” is hardly an epic, though Mehta places it in that company by evoking Milton’s Paradise Lost. “There Was a Place” is Mehta’s cri de coeur, foundational in establishing herself in the collection. In the poem, Mehta throws off her belongings and takes a swim in Lake Pisgah as her son watches from the shore. Though Mehta may pinpoint herself on a map, the poem circles and swirls through her preoccupations. Time passing is one such preoccupation and nothing marks time like watching a child grow.

         I swim to the middle of the lake, knowing this 

         moment is what youth isn’t, these assurances 

         mean nothing, believe me. I wave to you on the rock. 

         You are shifting places, moving away

It’s a tension every parent knows well: the passage of time, the push-pull to keep your child close but let them go. How can the time move so quickly, how can so many choices have been made? “All I want is exactly what I’ll never be,” Mehta declares later in the poem. Every choice for something is a choice against another thing. No one can live out every possibility. How often do we pause to mourn what we have chosen against? 

Overshadowing the personal, other threats loom: “It is too hot to live here anymore; this is not my planet. / I had not anticipated growing so wretched / before my mind was wretched…” The warming world is a threat—to Mehta, to the lake, to her beloved son. The poem ends with Mehta refusing to let herself or her son turn away from the oncoming dangers, “[…] my darling, don’t run away / from the sentient clarity of machines or women or hard work that brings / only locusts and wildfires; this is shakedown truth, this is how we love.”

How else does Mehta love? Art. Amidst the instability, art and literature are how Mehta anchors herself in life. Global warming and AI thrum in the background, but Mehta wields her influences and inspirations like a shield. Some of the most vivid writing in the collection is in relation to art. In “On Seeing Fra Angelico’s Annunciation,” Mehta speaks of the fresco as nothing short of a lifelong love affair: “The first time I saw it, at nineteen, I thought art was a way of becoming […]” She goes on:

         I have looked at the painting in my mind for thirty years

         How long since that evening-hour when I, nineteen,

         set about making passionate sense of my obsession

         with annunciations, and the conclusion I was left with then 

         and now is how awesome and preposterous it is, the working of the body […]

This is the truest gift of being in the middle of life, the amount of time you’ve had and the perspective you gain. How far back that time allows you to see, the patterns you will recognize, the relationships you will form. Far from lamenting the time being spent, Mehta knows how precious it is to have had it. Every body will fail in the end, but what we create can endure beyond our preposterous meat sacks. 

Mehta has passed on her love of art to her son. In the poem “Pot-pourri à vaisseau, from Sèvres,” Mehta writes of how she and her son became fixated on two similar 18th century potpourri vessels they found separately in two different museums. This becomes a sticking point between them. “You shrugged, because I trespassed your discovery: scents / you’ll leave behind, infinities of youth, geometries of world. / [ …] / What is seventeen if not bending shapes around you?” Was the vessel her son’s Annunciation? Will he visit over the next thirty years? Mehta ends the poem with an electrifying idea: “Art is love modeled in experience— / fired at higher temperatures than experiences.” Mehta clarifies this idea and takes it even further in “The Caged Skylark Reflected on a Green Vase.” She writes directly to the ancient heart and impulse of art-making:

         but what is art if not an object you labor over and cast in fire?

         A kiln is hotter than a cremation chamber. How quick

         our bodies turn to ash and then to earth; how strange

         we fashion clay from our bones from ash in earth.

This is inheritance and legacy, but not the end. Life is art is life is art, an endless cycle and Mehta finds herself in the middle of it. And being the middle means knowing there is an end. The titular vase was made by her son, who is on the cusp of leaving home. At the end of the poem, Mehta will keep the vase “but he will have all [her] sentences reflected on him.” This is the clay Mehta has made from her bones. This is her prophecy and her legacy.

Diane Mehta is the author of the forthcoming novel Leaving Malabar Hill (OR Books 2024), and the essay collection Happier Far (University of Georgia Press 2024-25). In addition to Tiny Extravaganzas (Arrowsmith, 2023), she has also published a poetry collection, Forest with Castanets (Four Way, 2019) and a poetics and style guide, How to Write Poetry (Barnes & Noble Books, 2005). Her work has been recognized by the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, a Kirby-Mewshaw fellowship at Civitella Ranieri, and a fellowship at Yaddo. She was the founding managing editor of A Public Space, landed and edited Glossolalia for PEN America, and was the executive nonfiction editor for Guernica. 

Catherine McNulty has contributed to The Columbia Journal and Kitchen Work. She holds an MFA from Columbia University where she once made Maggie Nelson laugh while introducing her as a guest speaker. In addition to working on her first novel, Catherine infrequently puts out issues of her zine, Poseur.

6 March 2024