The Autobiography of Rain by Lana Hechtman Ayers, Reviewed by Cynthia Neely

Lana Hechtman Ayers, in the The Autobiography of Rain, her sixth collection of poetry, claims not to be a painter. To a point, I gently disagree. A large number of poems in this book incorporate color, if not many colors, with striking syntax, and, in myriad ways, render a visual for the reader. For instance, in “The Well of Grief,” the poet describes The orange klezmer music of sun. In “Another Coronavirus Spring,” Daffodils solve the square root of yellow. And in ”Shivering,” a violet suture to repair the rent / sweater my heart is without you. The poems in this collection are undeniably filled with an imagery fueled by perceptive language expressions that feel visible beyond physically seeing––or hearing––them as words on a page.

In “ To the Art Teacher,” Ayers tells us:

I don’t think in brushstrokes ....

 All I know are words.
I can tell you what yellow tastes like in soup,
the way red smells in the morning,

how blue feels against your skin.
I can rhyme the song of green ....

Is there a way to pollinate with paint,
can I take this white page 

apply colors, give you what you ask,
this dream with no words
and teeth of rain?

The distinction is not lost on us. The poet is a poet, first and foremost, and words are her medium. Words are what she knows and we know this about her as well. As she writes in her opening poem, “Nineteen Things No One Knows about Me (And One They Do),” The answer to every question I ever asked is poetry.

I sense in this collection a marked desire to portray the visual, which she does, in more poems than not. In fact, in “Grief Rhymes with Yellow,” she tells us if I were painting grief / I would lean on yellow.  This is the type of poetry I, as a painter as well as a poet, lean into and absorb, closing my eyes to allow the color and pattern, the pigeons, jays and crows, the Van Gogh swirls to dance on the back of my eyelids. In “The Starry Night” Ayers writes:

I have never been at home anywhere
but in that painting,
or else in the rain where drops become
my shroud…

In “Imagine,” imagine is just what we do:

rock pigeons everywhere
their smooth green heads
their black moon eyes
iridescent necks nodding 

…pink feet lifting in rhythmic dance

It is important to note the book is not called the biography of rain. This book is, after all, an autobiography: these poems inhabit rain, feel like rain, sound like rain. These poems help us see the colors rain sees. They touch all that rain touches: the oppressed, damaged, saddened and washed clean––at least for a while. From “no one said it wouldn’t be hard,” Ayers writes:

 And then the rains come, dousing the ground,
soaking your skin, cleansing you of the grit, too,
at least for a while.

In “Dispelling the Mystery,” she says:

you finally realize whatever time you have remaining
is as the rain, it falls, it all dries up, then starts over again.
There is nothing to take back.

Tenderness, companionship, loss: all central to the major themes in this collection dedicated to the memory of her close friend and mentor, Patricia Fargnoli. Absence is joined by the joy of connection––with someone (a friend, a mentor, a husband), or something (a beloved dog, a Steller’s jay, the rain) . There is pleasure in living––even in the knowing that the life we live is transient and tenuous. There is sorrow. We will lose someone; someone will lose us. There is perhaps even pleasure in sorrow. Perhaps I have all my life been / too much in love with sadness, the poet says in “Window in Late January.”

In “Every Hour,” we discover even our own demise might be good news.

And that seems a fitting summary
for what we all want—
breathing in every hour
until the good news
of our demise arrives,
… good news—
because we lived with joy…

Finally, in “Lazy Ode to My Husband of Thirty-Some-Odd Years,” we come to appreciate the irrevocable, relentless losing––that tenuousness Ayers understands.

(you almost died –)

let it always be this easy

effortless as humming
a beloved familiar tune
even though the lyrics are
lost to us

The Autobiography of Rain offers us poems suffused with many colors, poems steeped in joy and a deep abiding love for the world the poet inhabits, as well as for those beings, both human and not, who touch her life. And these are poems of intense loss and profound sadness that any thinking, feeling person comes to understand goes hand in hand with gladness. There is nothing to take back.