Some people believe that before we are born, we choose our own parents. In a poem entitled “The first number will be a blues”, Sommer Browning describes a version of this story: “Before we were born, my mother tells us, / We watch films of all the lives we could be born into. Then we let’s choose. / The little baby points from his / astral cradle. The speaker marvels at the implications: “I choose this mommy. / I choose this daddy. / I choose this irrevocably broken marriage, / This jaw-locking accident , / Who burned popcorn” – the litany continues – “This root canal, this endless night on mushrooms, / This dog bite. “This DUI.” Is it absurd to imagine that we choose our own pattern of suffering, or that we could have chosen a life without any? As Willard Spiegelman notes in his book “Seven Pleasures”, “‘Hap’ means luck.” Happiness and occur share the same root. Whether we choose them or not, the random events in our lives, good and bad, belong to us. The details that add up to days and years – your street name, your first word, your favorite podcast – have what Ernest Becker might have called a “cosmic specialty”.

In his fifth book, THE WRITING OF AN HOUR (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 87 pages, paper, $15.95), Brenda Coultas uses time as an opening, an opening to capture what could be fascinating in the random. The first sequence of poems is both the object and the product of daily practice. Once the habit is established, she can no longer avoid it: “Heat the soup in the kitchen, even if it’s time to write. At the time of writing, heating the soup becomes writing, time becomes writing. “It’s time for writing, rain and dark winter days. Colds and shit, umbrellas and hate when the wind blows them on the coasts. Time is a kind of passive trap. The practice becomes self-justifying: “If I am absent from writing for a long time, the voices reform and say: ‘there are better uses of time than writing poems'”. And this obliges the poet to work with the material at hand: “Everything is closed and I miss the ties… Inside my shelter, on the germinated keyboard, an hour of random sentence follows from a bag of fragments The hour is fractal, it contains enough structure to extrapolate a lifetime: “The occurrences in an hour, the range, the beginnings of composition…the complexity it took to get there.” And later in the same poem: “Composing is a house of windows…window is the Norse word for the eye of the wind.”

What emerges is a theory of purpose: we were created, and our purpose is creation. Even an octopus is an artist, and “fills its lair with pieces of curiosities making a cabinet in the sea”. It is clear that some of these poems were written during the pandemic (“Everyone reminds me to read ‘Death in Venice'”), and everywhere there is an insistence to do despite this, despite the lack of contributions ( “Not a poem / for me am out of beauty”), despite this nagging fear that there are “better uses of time”. “And when I die will it be in the act of writing?” In a sequence titled “Journal of Places,” a poem about “the notebook as a talisman, a third eye,” writes Coultas, “Why are we here if not to be creators? » He recalls “Refusing Silence” by Tess Gallagher: “Else / what am I for, what use / am I if I don’t insist?