POEMS OF COVID-19

A topical collection offers joyful and mournful poems from quarantine.

A poet isolated and housebound by Covid-19 will inevitably write some pieces about it. In this brief collection, Robbins includes 23 poems occasioned by the pandemic, divided into three sections for the first three months of the outbreak. They begin with hopeful images and gestures, as here, from the opening of the first poem: “The sun doesn’t know / there’s a Coronavirus. / He shows up daily— / not burning, but smiling, / warming.” Even when one of the poet’s childhood friends contracts the disease, Robbins finds a way to cast it in an inspirational light, evoking her cohort’s great talent for dancing when they were girls: “She will laugh, and I will, with her, / and just see if her warrior T-cells don’t / inexplicably leap, legs open in a split, / like no cells anyone has ever seen, magnificent, / breathtaking, like her leaps when she was ten. / And she will heal.” In one piece, the poet chips her tooth biting into a chicken thigh but is afraid to go to the dentist due to the outbreak. In others, she is compelled to write odes to friends who have not survived the disease. “Coakley’s Crayons,” one hopeful lyric, discusses a neighbor girl who, having little to do while stuck at home during the pandemic, draws an optimistic picture of the world with the poet’s pastels. Robbins is effective at communicating direct, concentrated emotions even if she sometimes does so in trite language. “Lockdown Affirmation” achieves its slogan-y effect with some rather obvious rhymes: “I am strong, I am smart. / My survival’s now an art, / My goal not simply to survive / But please, to find a way to thrive.” The book darkens somewhat as it goes on and the severity of the pandemic becomes more apparent. “April Is the Cruelest Month” reads like an angry tweet: “Eighty thousand dead / in the US / and still not enough / testing.” For the most part, the poems feel like first drafts: The sentiments are a bit on-the-nose, and their attempts to capture the magnitude of the event mostly read as unsure and overly earnest (particularly given that people are now quite a bit past the first three months, temporally and psychologically). Even so, Robbins strikes upon a few honest moments, as in the simple “Toilet Paper”: “It’s back! / You can get it! / At last!”

An open-hearted but premature collection of Covid-19 poetry.