by Sarah O’Brien
Coffee House Press 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
“…a little pop, the dark going out”
Perhaps predictably, a book informed by elements of photography begins with the concept of the blank canvas: “Once, white paint was thrown out across the city, from the roofs of apartment buildings and the tops of trees.” Reimagining Genesis, the poem proceeds by complicating these lines. The people in the poem are covered in paint and apply color to everything they touch, all taking part in the creation of their environment. She concludes, “…they said, look, holding up a palm, this is a tree, this is a window, this is the sky.”
One of five winners of the 2008 National Poetry Series, Sarah O’Brien’s Catch Light is rife with creativity and imagination. O’Brien bends language like light. Here is some smart repetition and alliteration: “The density of light is a lumen, the density of a hand / is a lantern.” But back to imagination. From “Observatory”: “The heart of the blue whale is as big as a room. You could stand up in it suddenly; you could stay.” I’m helpless to avoid the mental image of Job inside a whale, or for that matter, Pinnocchio and Gepetto lighting the inside of Monstro the Whale. The fact that it is a heart amplifies both the warmth and the isolation. She concludes, “In a heart where it’s dark and unwindowed, and sounds like this, and this, and this.”
Darkness is, of course, essential when developing photographs in a darkroom. In Catch Light, the process of developing a photograph becomes a symbol for the developing or changing world, and the negatives of a photograph seem vulnerable or interior like a human spinal cord or perhaps even ghostly like a ribcage in an X-ray. Nearing the end of the first section of the book, “Light Matters,” O’Brien writes, “The world showing its negative. Held to / the light disappears or becomes more distinct.” Light allows for visibility and transparency: “Something when you come home and flick the switch / and see the room all at once, a little pop, the dark going out.” Light reveals the world, and here as well as in the title of the book, O’Brien and her speaker acknowledge its energy and influence, its illusions.
An integral factor in photography, light dominates the narrator’s attention in many of these poems. She considers its presence and absence:
…One girl I know
made shadow puppets in front of a projector all winter
of the birds coming back, slept
silhouetted against the screen, fingers splaying into trees.(from “Light Matters”)
Often synonymous with life, light, particularly sunlight, obviously affects life cycles beyond those of photographs. With the onset of the dark season, birds migrate, other creatures hibernate, and to varying extents, people suffer from seasonal affective disorder. O’Brien’s narrator is in awe of light and its positive and negative powers: “Light where there shouldn’t be light. And then you’re blind.”
The narrator’s interest in light is captivating; however, rubber stamp phrases (i.e. “Seeing is believing”) often distract. And vague assertions, while sometimes intriguing, do little to anchor these poems. They are missed opportunities to more deeply explore. Take this provocative line for instance, which closes “Chapter 6: The Negative”: “In some cultures, photographs are terrifying.” It is an interesting idea, but with no elaboration, occludes rather than suggests meaning. In the third section of the book, “Captions,” O’Brien writes short poems as “captions” to empty, differently-sized squares and rectangles. The concept is somewhat labored and reads like little more than device.
But Catch Light is ultimately a unique first collection. Readers particularly interested in artistic process should pick up this book, and we should all look for a second collection from O’Brien.
