Review of Cracked Piano by Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books, September, 2019.

Cracked Piano by Margo Taft Stever. CavanKerry Press. 68 pages.

This is a zenith book for Margo Stever. She takes complicated stories and unfolds them with clarity and personal style. The outstanding Section Two centralizes on Peter R. Taft, the poet’s great-grandfather, institutionalized in the Cincinnati Sanitarium for a mental disorder. It’s believed that Taft (half-brother of President Taft) was wrongfully diagnosed by an unfair 19th-century custom, without sound medical information. Letters written by Taft to his father were converted to poems by Stever and become all the more powerful for compression into poetic form. The letters, already lucid and concise, prove this was not a deranged mind. Corresponding letters from the hospital superintendent are chilling for their lack of psychiatric expertise and compassion. This book, with all its varied subjects, proves that every event is an opportunity for poetry.

One poem to note, in Section One, is “Worst Mother.” It just goes to show that poet/mothers can’t win. They give emotional energy and their kids would rather go to the mall. “See, instead, this picture / of you as a child / with bare feet — / the one in which you have / cherubs wings, / gossamer everywhere.”

Hand

Cell and bone
more servile than the elbow
and more birdlike

than the nose.
Thin fingers fan out
like spokes on a half-moon

wheel, or the toes of a balled
Chippendale claw.
A hand can be a monastery,

fingers bent in repose,
or a slaughterhouse
where nothing is safe.