by Laynie Browne
Wave Books 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Fit for Distraction

Often I look to poetry to offer me an alternate reality, something I can use to replace the things irking me at the moment, the laundry, the garbage, the mildew in the bathroom, and often, I am disappointed by what I find. However, when a poem surprises, when I find what I’m looking for, I’m still ultimately displeased. It hasn’t lasted long enough; the drug was weak. Perhaps these poems aren’t the most effectual or aren’t potent enough to endure the encroachment of daily life.

Well, Laynie Browne’s poems in The Scented Fox are Vicodin. The laundry is piling up, the mildew growing darker and more gruesome, the garbage steaming, but I’ve grown to not care; I’ve been persuaded by the poems’ psyches to lose myself, to forget the existence of anything outside the mind (because nothing external exists independent of our understanding that it exists anyway, right?), anything concrete enough to become a physical obstacle to stability, awareness, or wisdom. Laynie Browne is my new best friend.

What is most affecting in these poems is the fragmentation: the sense of confusion, or perhaps deep concentration that allows me to become entirely engulfed in the poem. I am not myself when I read these poems, but rather I am a creator of a separate reality. I can use any word to mean any thing. “Letter I.,” which begins “To a little croft,…” discards my sense of “real.” It states, “I am using the term ‘ritual’ to refer to the girl of wax.” Rituals we typically think of as ceremonial acts often related to religion, but Browne has defined ritual as “the girl of wax.” “Refer” creates an even more nebulous meaning for ritual. This is the consistency in The Scented Fox: options. Options allow for both disorientation and clarity.

The first poem in the collection is a stunning example of a consciousness that is teetering between perturbation and salience: “Though human / faces seem not to change while we are looking at them. For example, / the air around a cemetery is said to cause illness.” Are these thoughts related? Sure… the mind works by association and although I’m never sure what Browne is alluding to specifically, the concepts are vaguely familiar, as if I’ve had these same ponderings perhaps in sleep. Human faces may remain familiar over the years until their day of expiration, which brings us to the cemetery, a place cluttered with a fear of death and a somewhat blind respect for its authority in our lives. Such sensations are often the cause of nausea, anxiety, illness. In the second stanza: “Was there nowhere but here?” Here where? It’s unclear; however, what is understood is that the voice in this poem is alone; it is puzzled and working hard to attain answers. Again, the poem feels like home. So what we have here with The Scented Fox is a representation of a consciousness that is both preserved and sacrificed.

The book is reassuring in many ways. I can be lost for an entire poem, and suddenly I notice that perhaps I am intended to be lost. One line can then anchor me, as in “Wetted Nomenclature ( a prologue to tails)”; “Beholden she was to the myth / of blankness, to all forms which had passed beneathe her eyes and to / those which had not—” The universal experience of uncertainty and mistrust suddenly spawns faith, however fragile. Yes, we have all been met with a “blankness” or unknown which at times will debilitate. “She engulfed herself with such silence, such nothingness.” What is most important is that we accept this state when faced with it, wait it out. Brown is even more authoritative, however. “Wetted Nomenclature” begins: “I will now set out to disarrange myself.” She takes control of the situation before it arises, welcomes it, makes it her own. If this is happening, it is because I have willed it so. In other words, when life is confusing and f*ed up it’s because we like it that way. Yes, we’re sick, but if life isn’t challenging then wisdom cannot be authentic.

In accordance with the book’s sense of fragmentation are its sections. The Scented Fox contains no table of contents, so it is difficult to determine how many true “sections” there are. There seem to be three main books with one page starting a new section which is blank but for the ambiguous text “night, an interlude.” This page is followed by an untitled poem that ends: “The interrupted moment / returns, embeds itself in the skin.” This line break is impeccable and fascinating considering its placement in the book and the individual poem. It feels as though it is speaking to residual dream fragments left when we wake, or perhaps déjà vu: the things in life that we can’t let go of. The repetition of lines form threads throughout Scented Fox that feel similar to a recurring dream.

As we recede or proceed further into the mind’s seclusion or community, Browne’s concepts are further abstracted. The only unconvincing poems in the first section are those titled “The Traveling Crystal.” These poems travel too far into another world and become reminiscent of Jim Henson’s “The Dark Crystal.” Admittedly, my mind may be relying too heavily on association here; however, the mind is something I can readily believe in whereas a crystal that “wants to travel” and “appeared in the middle of the floor” is slightly more difficult to ruminate on; it is more an idea to noodle with. A similar feeling resonates after reading “Book Second Tales In Miniature” and “Book Third Festoon Dictionary.” The book is whole without these sections.

Ultimately, Browne has supplied us with a very malleable text, and therefore, a very successful text. In a poem titled “The Book of Slowly,” Browne contrasts the implications of words and pictures, however vaguely. This poem gives the sense that pictures are too final. They can be interpreted differently by viewers, but cannot carry the depth of a sentence which is continuously “tunneling.” “The sentence contains its onlooker.” The idea here is continued in a longer poem, “The Book of Spinning.” “Thought is that which cannot be parted from matter.” It sounds as though pictures are superfluous when one has words.

When one is dealing with such large concepts and such transcendental ones, it is difficult to avoid sentimentality and loftiness. Browne does not let this traverse deter her. I like this example from “Letter VI” which begins “To a lost scientist”: “The mosaic of hours pieced together by the generosity of / night falling kindly across anyone’s features.” In this poem, Browne discusses the “calamity of time,” an often unmanageable topic. The aforementioned lines flirt with sentimentality. They come just close enough to be felt, but they never cross the line. Browne keeps them in check with their anonymity: we’re dealing with “anyone’s” features. Again with time in “Letter VII”:

            The days in their sequential ceremony repeat

            themselves and I take care to bury them deeply, so that no animals or

            persons may come across them.

But does she? No, of course not. We’re unearthing them right now. This is the sacrifice the poet makes, making available the kernels of thought and emotion that we don’t really want to share face to face. They’re painful, ugly, and endless; but they are useful because they connect us internally apart from our meaningless interactions at work, in the bank, or at the supermarket.

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