"Stranded with Praise" by poet Karen Carcia

Recently my father and I played the game that asks you to imagine you're marooned on a desert island--but luckily you get to decide on a book that is marooned with you. My father (always a rule breaker) came up with a list of twelve authors. When I insisted he pick one, he said, "Shakespeare." When I tried to insist he pick one single work, he hemmed and hawed. I know under different circumstances he'd choose a tragedy, but stranded on a desert island, well, I think it's clear why "Hamlet" could be a dangerous choice. He never was able to land on a final answer.

For me, there was no hemming and hawing. My book: "Praise" by Robert Hass. Frankly, my copy of the book looks as if it has been marooned on a desert island. I leave it out on my desk so the cover, once a fern green, is faded to a pale seafoam; it's the clear victim of numerous cat attacks and the pages are yellowing quickly. The spine, creased so often, is starting to give.

The truth is, I chose this book for one poem, the difficult and beautiful "Meditation at Lagunitas." The opening of the poem reminds that, though we imagine the world as constantly changing, really, things stay the same: "All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking." A reassuring concept to one cut off from the world.

The poem questions a word's ability to mean all we need it to. I imagine that on this island there wouldn't be many of the things I love (like blackberries, or "little orange-silver fish") and I would intensely feel that "a word is elegy to what it signifies." Doesn't elegy begin with memory? I think there would be days when I'd want "everything [to] dissolve," including that separation between the past and present, so that I, too, could remember an old lover, not with sadness, but with "numinous" beauty, "Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry."

The book also has all the necessary reminders of the life I'd have left behind, all the nouns that once delighted: "white rose petals," "Orange Crush," "peaches," "nighttime sirens" and, my favorite, a "yellow bicycle."

Of course the title itself recommends the book. There'd be days when I'd need to remember its directive. And, it reminds me of a poem by Adam Zagajewski, whose opening lines, "Try to praise the mutilated world. / Remember June's long days, / wild strawberries, drops of wine..." reminds me of another poem, Jennifer Grotz's villanelle "Try," all reminders of my connection to the world, and more importantly, that my own small pain is just that.

And, of course, on days when I'd say, "Yeah? Well, praise this!" using praise as my new expletive, at least I could turn to the closing poem of the collection, "Songs to Survive the Summer."