Reading Tough Enough, I think of Basho—“It is deep autumn/my neighbor/how does he live, I wonder.” I wonder, too, how one lives, survives and even thrives in “deep autumn.” The “how to,” might be found in the work of these four poets who have immersed themselves in poetry, art, music, dance, embracing life’s sorrow as well as its joy. In “Tulare Motel” Annie Menebroker speaks of Wilma who escapes hellish summer heat, “. . . But she blessed/ this strange room, played cards/ with her brother, and called her/ friends to spread the word of survival.” Spreading the word of survival—what act of poetry is more blessed than that—is exactly what the poets of Tough Enough do. That they refer to themselves as Tough Old Broads speaks to an unselfconscious resilience that is the backbone of this collection. There are questions here as well as answers. Kathryn Holwein’s villanelle, “My Acts,” begins “Are my acts like the ash I will become/since everything feels ghostly from this striving.” Victoria Dalkey’s “Elegy In The Old City Cemetery” questions the nature of the mind: “A new paradigm for the mind holds/it is like a cloud, vaporous, amorphous,/ a shape-shifting function of imagination.” Perhaps the ultimate answer to how one might live, given sufficient courage, is found in Viola Weinberg’s “Arthur’s Seat, The Easy Way,” the poem that closes this sterling collection: “I threw myself into the very muscle of desire.”

Four different strains of speculative intelligence. Four lifetimes sorted. The same years captured by different sensibilities—all with that certain ache that is poetry. What I like is the rich mix of memory & public commentary. Annie Menebroker’s lyrics bursts, for example—the cogent self-questioning that turns to larger issues. Kathryn Hohlwein’s spiritual sense in poems that are moving & insightful, always emotionally right. It’s not by chance that the four poets have integrated their gifts & their life-work. From her practice as an art critic, Victoria Dalkey seems to take her vision & feel for order, her wit & sense of tonal shift. Viola Weinberg recaptures, exuberant & expansive, in the know, the challenges of working in the media & being a mother. Her intense & dramatic poem, “Arthur’s Seat, the Easy Way,” about climbing Scotland’s almost mythic height, in spite of her health & physical limits, is about the transcendence that is the task for all four poets.

                                             Dennis Schmitz

                                             Susan Kelly-DeWitt