Posts Tagged ‘Lanie Wilt’

The Third Body

Friday, May 9th, 2008

by Jeff Knorr
Cherry Grove Collections 2007
Reviewed by Lanie Wilt

7

Travel by Bird-beak

knorr_coverJeff Knorr’s The Third Body is a book about openings, spaces made and lost, and the knowing that in our living and leaving, in our awareness and inevitable absence, crouches a fear that love too will turn to dust:

 

Something hard and thin is coming

out of the blue afternoon, something
opening like a yawn and deep
as the dog’s brown eyes.
A breeze moves between us

clearing out the space
for all that is spread before us,
the seeds blowing, the skating sun,
all that is certain to come.

These openings come from light that weaves through branches and breathing, and into the beauty Knorr knows will turn to ash: “I fear touching my love; she is made of cinders / As light comes, the moon breaks to ashes in the west.”  With a skilled and steady hand Knorr extends his invitation, a poet’s call to follow his steps through “the shift of light and leaves” to the edge of violet night, return to love under apple orchards and the comfort of old friends lost.  These are pages of need and hesitation, knowing lines that tremble beneath the weight of time and the anticipation of death. Landscapes themselves open, unfolding in the language and energy of dreams— access into rhythms of sleep and seclusion somehow as firmly rooted and real as the trees that shiver in winter’s wind.

In moments of sought-out solitude, silence is both frightening and magnetic:

And they gather themselves in one graceful movement
turning against the air, a solid plane of birds
deep in a breeze, holding the shape
the law of wind spoke to them like a ghost,
as if we all might suddenly hear the one terrible secret
listening to the flowers scream,
watching the clouds bend over tipping wings.

While Knorr’s rhythm falters, if only slightly, in the more direct political poetics of poems like “River Dragging,” the return to his familiar more than makes up for it.  Knorr is truly at home among the landscapes of light and shadow that stretch across his pages, managing without sentimentality a scope and sensibility often missing from such scenery.  Knorr builds his landscapes from the ground up, the eventuality of death and annihilation in tow as he effectively captures– then amplifies– lives as impermanent as sound.

Throughout his poems wife, son, and faithful old dogs are all possessed and lovingly pursued through a wilderness kinder and closer than the “murmuring/ crowd of the sand-hot beach”.  Amidst Knorr’s lines you’ll find yourself somehow willing to follow him into a place of retreat, enter conversation with winds and hunting dogs, the cool river’s flow and “the single maple leaf/ flaming red in his hands.”

Along the way are the labor pains of adoption, the lingering ache and pull of withholding what is essential, and the recognition that these are the first of many separations, approaching as surely as seasonal storms.  Here’s Knorr in, “The First Time We Lost Our Son”: 

…we were in our other country
alive as water on that December morning
the orphanage director took our son,
the light waving away through the mimosa branches,
the dog snapping, our boy’s small arms pushing at her.
And while she tried to calm him you just leaned on me
broken as deadfall firs, cloudburst crying.
…
The going away doesn’t fade beyond the closing clouds;
the leaving keeps coming like weather
that has settled in for a long season.

In the midst of Knorr’s greatest passion and connection, he confesses: “It seems/ impossible that…[he]… might lose this feeling,”—intimacy of silence and worship in overlap.  This is what Knorr is after, the “essential” flickering through moments that wave away through branches, retreating through still air.  Knorr is on some level a poet of terror—unable to escape death in the very moments he feels most alive.

Overall, Jeff Knorr’s The Third Body is an insightful, serious read you’ll want to return to.  His lines of quiet connection and clarity rise like “a ripple…from deep, slow water,” welcome moments for those seeking refuge from the endless (often mindless) sights, sounds, and sayings pressing in on all sides.

*

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Dominant Hand

Monday, April 16th, 2007

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske
Mayapple Press 2008
Reviewed by Lanie Wilt

6_5stars_6

Brain Wins

kelikowske_coverElizabeth Kerlikowske opens Dominant Hand with a drawing duel between her left and right hand, each vying for dominance. Their struggle is an exploration in perception, a mapping of the fight for dominance between two sides of the brain set in opposition. Music and mutability flow from the left hand as the right carefully orders and renders its surroundings. Conflict turns to climax when the right, frustrated by the leisurely wanderings of her partner, delivers the finishing blow, grabbing her “…perfect roses…by the…stems and [holding] them tight, thorns/ and all”—“That would hurt everybody.”

Instantly, the violence of domination slams mind and body into something singular; the struggle is over—perception united by pain that will punctuate the pages of the rest of the book. While “Dominant Hand” is foundational within the collection, its importance is only apparent after one has followed Kerlikowske into the intimate recesses of memory, brushing away cobwebs and clutter into the corners of a mind alive with pains and pleasures distinctly feminine. The power of the mind, its action on and against both body and its environment, is explored throughout Kerlikowske’s line, silhouetted in surreal poems like “Gestalt Primer” and associative streams of thought like “Morning, Asylum Lake.”

The most striking moments of the book are deeply invested in the bond between mothers and daughters. The apparent death of the poet’s mother at the age of thirteen weaves in and out of nearly every poem in the collection—a spidery “web of misery [that] glistens in the dark” (“Damage Ode,”), the speaker confessing, “I never stopped missing her” (“Persephone”).

Kerlikowske’s retelling of the classic myth follows her younger self through the loss of her mother at the onset of womanhood, the fumblings and grief of finding her way into womanhood alone, and the healing which the birth of her own daughter brings. The lines of the poem blossom with beacons of love and grief calling for mother to return, swaying in a landscape of waiting:

…I made nature
in her image: blue birds for her eyes, canaries
of hair, a monarch of lips. Every pansy
a cameo of her face. If she saw herself,
she might remember where she belonged.
I stuffed milkweed pods with fluff like the
down pillows we slept on, like the presents
she’d left on my chair, each of the twelve birthdays
she was there. I created prairie in the pattern
of our tablecloth, but by thirty, I knew she
wasn’t coming back.

Ultimately, the speaker experiences the pain of having to leave her own daughter, then concludes with an uncharacteristically hopeful passage describing a long-anticipated reunion in the underworld:

My heart beat fast and the light of wild
mustard and goldenrod burst into view, and there
was Mother, cleome smile, her loom, arms held
out at last for comfort.

Men occupy a separate sphere within the text. Many are menacing, hungry like Hades stealing away, this time, mother from daughter in the cycle of separation bound up in sexuality and flow. These are men, as in “The Days”, that rush “into vulnerable beds, destroying homesteads, / breaking up families, and carrying off beloved nouns: the / cow, trust, Sis.”

Other men are alluring and strong, for example, in moments spent admiring the strong working back of a “husbandman,” men allured and enjoyed by this feminine voice—embraced, then abandoned, “not forever but long enough.”

These moments of company, more than connection, crystallize as the warmer passages in the text. Solitude, however, dominates Kerlikowske’s meditations, stalked by death that’s a “petal practically transparent” (“Waiting For It To Stop”):

You want to spend time in your room alone
but they stalk you there,
the ways you might die,
one to each corner.
(“Your Deaths”)

In “Waiting for it to Stop,” the speaker is alone after a shower with her lover, looking out into the rain thinking of the husband and children who are off swimming “on the other side of the state.” The pain and hollowness of her existence vibrates on the page, while rain-cloaked we watch her settle her gaze on

…a bee husk on a windowsill.
You want to be that empty.

Ultimately, Kerlikowske’s lines live among the lakes and leaves of Michigan shorelines. Through the turmoil of marriage and lovers, death and injury, we see the poet solemn under starry skies, quiet, still and searching for a sign. Perhaps “After You Left I Observed That All Things Take Flight” is the most haunting and lovely of the collection, standing out as a spell and a song: the meditation of a heart that has penned lonely lines in the privacy of night, minus the melodramatics.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s, Dominant Hand, is a book about being left behind, seared by the death of a mother whose absence follows her into the weathered mattresses of marriage and out into blackberry briers. The collection is a thoughtful, adamantly feminine investigation of perception and pain. The poems take patience, but persistence will prove well worth the while.

*

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