A Review of Four Walks in Central Park by Aaron Poochigian

Review by Carla Sarett

Aaron Poochigian, Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park. Familius, 2025.

Review by Carla Sarett

I grew up hearing such poems as Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” It’s a poem that children and their parents can readily enjoy together, and one whose meaning only deepens as we age. I have wondered if any contemporary poet would step to the plate and start writing poems that can appeal to younger minds as well as more sophisticated palates, without the sense of slumming. And lo, to my delight, Aaron Poochigian has produced exactly such a book in Four Walks in Central Park.

Listen as Poochigian invites us to walk with him (in verse that can’t help but enchant):

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We struggle, but there's always Central Park 
offering water that upholds and bark 
to lean on. People need its long, lake-flecked 
recovery, its routes and shoots and birds.

Writers, you know, they leave their worlds of words, 
but Frederick Olmsted, landscape architect, 
and his ingenious right hand Calvert Vaux 
left us a good-sized earth as their bequest.
The public rectangle runs fifty blocks 
from north to south, a half mile east to west.

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From the gravitas of the opening line —“We struggle, but there’s always Central Park”—we feel what’s at stake. Central Park is not merely a pretty adornment of Manhattan; we require it in our “struggle,” it “upholds” us and we “lean on” it. The poet recognizes Frederick Olmsted’s landscaping as the equivalent of poetry, with an intimate nod to the reader (“you know”). There’s a reason that Central Park invites more than forty million visitors a year.

A reviewer’s confession: I adore Central Park. As a teen, it was the place I’d meet my “city” friends on weekends. When I lived in Manhattan, I took every opportunity to walk cross-town rather than hop on a bus. Later, when asked to contribute to a festschrift for my advisor, I wrote about two of the park’s glories—Emma Stebbins’s The Angel of the Waters and Bessie Potter Vonnoh’s The Burnett Fountain. (Both make appearances in Poochigian’s Four Walks in Central Park.)

But even for a seasoned flaneur, Central Park is an easy place to get lost in (although it is not all that large, relative to other city parks). To that end, Poochigian’s book is a sturdy guide with four poetically-named walks: “For the Overworked”; “For the Fallow”; “For the Melancholy”; and “For the Disillusioned.” Despite these gloomy names, the poem bubbles away merrily. A walk past the Children’s Glade and Belvedere Castle cures any variety of angst, especially if you “haven’t left your office much / for years and don’t try new things anymore.” (Spoiler alert: if you’re seeking a gift for a New Yorker or a homesick transplant, look no further.)

In case you’re wondering, yes, you can use the book to navigate Central Park (or at least the parts that are explored in it). Take “The Mall,” where we “step with pep on Center Drive” in “the deliberate world of Central Park.”

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We step with pep northeast on Center Drive, 
then, with a pivot, strut into the round 
plaza that feeds the south end of the Mall-
just one of many meditated realms
in the deliberate world of Central Park.

The only trees they let in here are elms,
and lamps in them add romance to the dark
and little shadows when the toothed leaves fall.

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The author never forgets to be specific (“northeast on Center Drive”). And so we “pivot” and “strut” into the plaza and admire the lamps that “add romance to the dark / and little shadows when the toothed leaves fall.” It’s not a monumental vista and the shadows are “little” (but oh, so romantic).

Poochigian has spoken of his love for the didactic in poetry, with “its proximity to reader, its animation and its very human approach to learning.” In a book about a famous park, accurate history counts; Poochigian carries the narrative without skimping on the facts, as evidenced in this lively excerpt from “The Blockhouse”:

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     First Sir William Howe
came marching in through what is Brooklyn now 
with musketeers and Hessian mercenaries
to put our pesky insurrection down.
Then came their "wooden wall:" instead of ferries, 
sightseeing cruisers or a garbage scow, 
square-rigger frigates loyal to the crown 
were bobbing in the Hudson.

     Here it stood:
a battery of cannons that could flatten 
uprisings from us trodden snakes downtown.
Redcoats were marching through my neighborhood!
Imagine: subjects reigning in Manhattan.
Monarchy, frankly, makes me want to puke.
(Strange that King James the Second, once the Duke 
of York, is why we live in "New York City.")

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I may have learned some of this material in elementary school, but never as vividly. I can almost feel the excited history teacher pointing to the redcoats. Or, hear how this poet seamlessly instructs the novice on the different styles of gardens in “The Conservatory Garden”:

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Passing between custodial oaks, we enter 
the posh Conservatory Garden which exhibits 
three distinctive national styles: 
here on the north side, the fastidious French; 
symmetrical Italian in the center; 
tousled English to the south.

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It’s not a bad way to sum up the aesthetic differences: “fastidious French,” “symmetrical Italian,” “tousled English.” Plus, the use of “posh” introduces just the right note of insouciance; we’re walking for fun, after all. But learning can be fun.

I tried to think of another contemporary American poet tackling this material. I suspect most would veer off into memoir, and walking directions, be damned; they would speak of first (or more likely, last) kisses, griefs, etc. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but Poochigian’s after something different. In a rare personal moment, “The Germination,” he describes his initial immersion in the park as a vision: “I could feel the mental lightning strobe / groundlessly as it leapt from lobe to lobe.” The young classicist (still somewhat at sea in New York) decides:

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What has redeemed me is an inner oath
to make a garden of that revelation, 
to do now what Vergilius had done 
for Romans, out of love for Central Park.
This fire of ours was kindled by that spark.

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(For those unaware, Aaron Poochigian “grew up” to be a fine translator as well as a poet.) Now, I haven’t read Vergil’s Georgics, and whatever Latin I once knew has flown away. But this tale feels sweetly familiar. Many of us visited The Met alone, and afterward, walked through Central Park and had our own youthful shifts and turns. It is what Olmsted’s park invites. In an article published in The Paideia Institute, Poochigian has written:

I do feel I have susceptibility to the numinous—that is, to the feeling that something supernatural is present (as in divine epiphanies). I try to describe that feeling in Four Walks in Central Park….One of poetry's powers is in just that: revealing the meaning behind our shared human encounters with the world.

Sometimes, “numinous” poetry can feel a tad airy (at least to me) but Poochigian’s diction is everyday-ish, his pace is as brisk as Browning’s, and his rhymes are as swingy as good song lyrics. Take these lines from “Strawberry Fields” that review “all we got today.”

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Let's go back over all we got today— 
the inland seas, the frilled and the no-frills 
terrain and doves and that last sad ovation.
None of it grants degrees or pays the bills, 
and that's the point: to purposefully stray.
You said, why not?, when Big Diversion beckoned, 
and we went so far in we got away.

There's recreation and there's re-creation.
You look enlivened: less too tired and more
gung-ho; less wallflower, more troubadour.
We stroll out of the park on 72nd, 
and off you go into the subway station, 
sun-kissed, it seems, less elsewhere than before.

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This is, on one level, about a garden memorial, in honor of John Lennon who was shot not far from Central Park at the Dakota (“that last sad ovation”). But it describes our experience of all art, from comics to Caravaggio, “None of it grants degrees or pays the bills / and that’s the point: to purposefully stray.” And the big payoff: “There’s recreation and there’s re-creation.” (Maybe my favorite line in the book.) And there we go….from a memorial garden, to spiritual “re-creation” and then back to the subway station, “sun-kissed, it seems, less elsewhere then before.”

I can’t catalogue all the rich ideas that wind through way through Four Walks in Central Park— there are so many. “Go live a life of curious events,” the poet says of The Alice in Wonderland Statue. and in “The Conservatory Garden, “ which describes kids playing in a fountain, Poochigian declares:

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     Look how art can thrive.
If we ran splashing through and joined them there
—still lives, we would forever be alive 
the breathless way ecstatic artworks live.

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Oh yes, look how art can thrive. This book made me want to hop aboard a plane and saunter, deliciously alone, through Central Park with its “roots and shoots and birds.” Next time, though, I will bring along Four Walks in Central Park.

Carla Sarett is a contributing editor at New Verse Review. She writes poetry, fiction and, occasionally, essays. She has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best American Essays, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net. Her latest poetry chapbook, Any Excuse for a Party, is out from Bainbridge Island Press. Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is based in San Francisco.