by Carrie Olivia Adams
Black Ocean 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Beyond the White Sky
The process of moving from one home to another is always awful, but it carries at least one benefit: you’re too busy to get weighed down by sentiment and nostalgia. The forward thinking involved in packing, labeling, organizing, and paying don’t allow for it. It’s there to some extent, outlining the walls, the floors, the objects that remain in an emptying room, pressing you with the inevitability of moving forward—nevertheless, you keep cataloging, organizing, junking.
So the business-like novelty of “Notes toward its beginning”—the “outline” poem that opens Carrie Olivia Adams’s chapbook A Useless Window—is forgivable. She has divided her move into five categories: “What will remain,” “To move,” “Things unlikely to fit through the door,” “To pack,” and “Forgotten Things.” Each category has numerous sub-categories except for the last one: by simply labeling the “forgotten things,” she’s able to precisely account for the sad fact of the many things that disappear from year to year. Sentiment is controlled, and thus, excised.
That brand of precision is characteristic of Adams’s work in this little book. Her spare lyrics emphasize the role of the individual surrounded with the ineffable qualities of silence and empty space: “If there is a footnote to absence,” she writes, “it is the beating heart.” A person is never absent from him- or herself seems the implication.
Adams is most distinctive when she assumes the perspective of silence itself. The words comprising her little fragments are surrounded by white space in the same way a person is surrounded by silence stretching as far as the nearest noise. Silence, interminable, implies the order of things as they stand:
…so that they would stay fixed
and knowable in their boxes and frames;And us too, measurable,
the finite is not romantic, but requiredof us.
Though an early attempt to define the term “surrealism” is superfluous, Adams also seems a natural born surrealist:
But the building bends under sleep.
The bed moves an inch closer to the window before morning.
Her body stretched between walnut doors and oak beams travels.
Sleep, it seems, is not necessarily rest: “She goes for a walk in the rain / …because dreams had become her sleep.” Like the outline that opens the book, Adams is able to control over-emotive romance by inhabiting a dreamlike world. She’d do best to stay there; once or twice she’s less effective because she slips into narrative-ish drib. These lines, for example, follow a conversation between two lovers:
And though that shouldn’t have satisfied him,
it did. Knowing her,
he knew there was no other answer.
Far more interesting is her childlike astonishment with the fact that she’s a living body that can move, do things, and be surrounded by things:
Yet, the room was small
in its emptiness. And I, in the middle,
reached out toward the walls.
In one poem, the narrator asks an unnamed “you” to look at her when her words “find” him: “If you could tell me / that they have arrived.” They have, and I think anyone who inhabits Adams’s Useless Window world will be interested in reading a full-length book. She’s honed her voice here, and a shift to something both brand new (not a full length that recycles this work) and longer will undoubtedly reveal a room worth inhabiting.
