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Lisa Berg’s poetry garden was seeded early. Her childhood included an abundance of books and parents who read to her at bedtime; later she found poetry in her parents’ biblical literature and sacred music. Now the co-owner and manager of two coffee shops (Blue Moon and Second Blue Moon) in South Minneapolis, she works parallel with her customers as they follow their curiosity in journals or on laptop computers. Meanwhile, even as Berg is making change or taking inventory in one of her cafés, her mind is also busy collecting images for future poems.
In Coming Back to the World, Berg’s voice is clear and strong; her settings and themes are common, her language simple, but the power of her poems transcends simplicity. In many of her poems of childhood, identity, and love, passion is the undertow. These poems provide solace for the love hungry (and who among us isn’t?). She writes of fulfillment, unrequited love, lost love, love through friendship, and more. And her images of love stay with us.
In “Landscape,” the opening poem, as our narrator is driving home through the night/ after our comfort and passion, she passes the house of a friend: I look up/ and see her reading in her attic/ drenched in thick, yellow light. The lover is the mysterious, unseen one, and the sustaining friend is the steady one whom she describes clearly for us, drenched in the moon’s light. The moon, a tradition for love poems, is here instead used in a surprising way to represent the essential steadiness of friendship.
A pivotal point in the book occurs in “Waiting for Another Kind of Life.” Berg uses farm details as metaphors for her struggle to break free of the familiar so that she can seek her destiny—that path worn lower into the ground like the prairie road/ is just two ruts in the field…once, when a friend and I trotted free and clear/ of the fences along an old dirt road.
Berg began writing poetry late in life, in 1992, when she took a poetry class with Deborah Keenan at the Loft Literary Center. We are all the richer for the years she brings to her writing. She has experienced and suffered as any person must by middle age, but when she saves her experiences in memory, she also saves the minutiae of the visual experience, raising up authentic details in poems such as the one about ice-skating as a child in “Noticing Just in Time”: Metal on ice, the scrape and swoon of a blade, a heart content to glide, to live in the hopeful/ dark; the sky ringed/ in the red of the/ weak sun begging notice.
She describes poetry as having saved her life during a period of hopelessness and spiritual exhaustion. Now she creates poems “in order to remain in the present as much as possible.” While Berg’s poetry has been published before in literary journals, Coming Back to the World is her first book of poetry.
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