STARRED Book Review: Window and Mirror

Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

An extraordinary collection about everyday life

Ted Virts explores themes of family, religion and everyday experience in Window and Mirror. He does so with an affectionate and affecting humanity, and he’s equipped with the keen ear of the great poet.

The author’s introduction, in setting out his goal with these poems, inadvertently spells out what modern poetry is all about: noticing small moments, believing that there is a “sacredness to everyday life.” But Virts goes further, enlarging his scope by explicitly posing existential questions, asking whether we matter or not in this universe of galaxies upon galaxies.

The opening poem entitled “Presence/Absence” is perfectly placed to set the tone of this collection. Just observe, pleads the poet, and the wonders of seeming mundanity will reveal themselves. The recurring refrain of the word “Sit” is accompanied by double spaces, so allowed to ring out through the poem’s reverberant lines. 

In “Pandemics,” Virts carries the tradition of quoting a line from the news to which the poem then responds. It is about a pig pandemic, allowing the poet to indulge in much delightfully clever wordplay about pig figures of speech. Delightful cleverness continues in a poem that takes the Cartesian cliché “I think therefore I am,” twisting and stretching it to reveal various meanings.

Many of these poems struggle with Christianity, even using Jesus as a speaking character. If not religiously inclined, most will find this theme yielding the weakest results but not without its successes. The enjambed titled, “Thoughts about Jesus: Yarn,” with its compelling rhythm, makes one wonder if its ternary structure is meant to symbolize the Trinity, and the sixteen word long “Rainbow” is a marvel of concision in Biblical commentary.

The family motif of the collection is centered around the father. Not the father figure or the Father, but rather a particular father, albeit an evidently regular one. Through the poems we see glimpses of scenes from his life with his children, his aging and his death. “Downstream” is a moving, beautiful poem about Alzheimer’s disease, offering words for what pain can make unspeakable.

In “Sacred Acts,” Virts reframes modern safety gestures, like putting on a seatbelt, as motions of prayer, drawing parallels that will stick with the reader. Elsewhere, the fashionable exercise of the kettlebell swing is viewed as the ticking of a clock. The trappings of modern life are held up in contrast or connection to things that one perceives as deeper.

The poet’s best work comes in the form of two poems about trees, or, rather, about these trees being like their observer, or their observer being like the trees. It’s a simple metaphor, but these poems are elevated to small masterpieces by their language. The opening of “Near The Border” draws a wide picture of the Mesquite tree, its “ragged arms drifting green / scratch a half-circle in sky,” and bird song leads off to the sunset, where meaning meets diction and rhythm. The other tree poem, “Ocotillo,” should be experienced unspoiled. It is a bolt from the blue, electrifying in the way only the greatest poetry can be. 

As in its many astonishing moments, Window And Mirror borders on the miraculous.

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