The first poem in the collection sets Davio’s mission and tone. The end of the poem asks, “To what / significance such eroded things?” This seems to be the question at the heart of the book, one that the speakers struggle to answer in different ways. Davio explores the erosion of faith, time, memory, and love with clear speakers who are unafraid to expose doubts and question the world. The speakers are alternately compassionate and cruel, ironic and sincere. They speak in poems that sometimes pin us down like an older brother until we call uncle or whisper soft doubts into our ears, making us question our own mothers.

A stand-out poem in the first section of the book is The Eye on the Sparrow. The title alone, of course, reminds us of that other hymn, “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” but instead, Davio asks whose eye? In the poem, a sparrow flies into a window and the only ones watching are the speaker and her cat:

I don’t place the wayward missile
in a shoebox, safe from the prowling
of other half-domestic neighborhood pets,

despite common wisdom on the matter.
I don’t want to see the sparrow thrash
as I lift it, my hands inside lime green

latex gloves. I don’t want to hear it
rasp a sound like mom from its cracked beak.
I don’t want to see its death shudder

while I watch, worrying about exotic flu.
I stop looking. . . .

I found this a harrowing poem, given the title and what the hymn promises: even the sparrow matters to Him, we are not alone, do not be afraid. Davio turns this around. The speaker’s eye is on the sparrow, but then chooses not to be, not to rescue, refuses “common wisdom,” simply because she does not want to see. The repetition of “I don’t want to” pounds that moral and emotional refusal home and forces readers to ask if He does this too, sometimes—turns away, leaving only the cat to watch what happens to us next. As readers, we wonder if we should judge this speaker or other speakers in these poems who freely admit, “My mood is inhumane.” Davio doesn’t make answering that question easy. She recognizes that darkness and light move in ways that bleed into each other, that the border blurs:

When first I learned that dark
was a threat, that its tuneless
whistle signifies no good thing,
I slept with full lights,

burned candles in corners.
It wouldn’t go. The heavy
felt of it kept fuzzing the walls.
Now I stay at the window,

watch it seep past the ring
of streetlight on pavement.
I listen as it hums out blood
at its edges. Softly.

In two sections, Sin and Virtue, she titles poems with words for sins (Anger, Envy, Pride, Gluttony) and virtues (Charity, Humility, Patience, Industry), but the reader quickly sees the irony at work—we could almost switch the titles (Pride with Humility) and the poems would be the same. Sin and virtue, in the real world, are planks on the same table, the hinge and the door, twin sisters walking hand-in-hand, indistinguishable.

Davio carries this idea just far enough, balancing it with poems that inject humor and longing into this exploration of darkness and light. In places, the poems seem to rely on two-dimensional portraits of characters that leave me asking for more, for that other layer that would take me somewhere unexpected. As a reader, I felt like Davio sometimes didn’t trust me enough to let the image do the work and injected a “telling” line to make sure the point was made. This is something all poets struggle with—the desire for the subject of the poems to be clear in order to make room for the meaning, to say something both with image and with exposition.

The strength of the book is seen clearly in the title poem. In Burn This House, Davio acknowledges the necessity of destruction; that the safe, peaceful, firm, stout house of the hymn is too small a place for any whole human experience to live. It reminds us that want and trouble join us to the world and to the divine that is bigger than sin, virtue, and judgment. Instead of looking for rescue or water when your house is burning, Davio says to

Hold each ember by your teeth in shelter.
Allow each column of timber to stray
from notions of form and size, catching
flakes of fire on your tongue.

Amen.

Related Posts:

• Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You by Keely Hyslop
• “Many Ways to Say It” by Eva Saulitis
• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger

Killer title is the first thing I thought when I came across Keely Hyslop’s debut collection, Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You, which was selected by Major Jackson as the 2011 winner of the Michael Rubin Book Award. It is a killer title and the poems in the book live up to its promise. Hyslop’s website describes the book as a “three part exploration of the mythologies of empowerment and victimization, both official and personal, that an individual uses as the raw material with which to construct a cohesive identity.” It is obvious that Hyslop has thought hard about this work. The poems show that she is a devoted student of poetry—one who writes from instinct and heart, is willing to take risks, and allows for mystery, but also recognizes the philosophical and intellectual forces that move through her writing. This is a difficult balance to strike. Poetry is hard work, both emotionally and intellectually, and Hyslop isn’t afraid to walk the rope between intelligence and heart, skill and instinct. The best poems in the book mix these elements beautifully.

The core of the book is about fate and purpose in life—how we follow or avoid it and how we make choices that move us toward or away from what we most desire. And, always, the outside forces of history, society, and family that throw us off balance or give us strength to weather the storm, and the curious way they can do both at the same time.

Hyslop begins with a section titled Letters to Anne Bonny which engage with the historical female pirate. The poems include persona poems in the voice of Anne Bonny and prose poem letters from a more modern speaker who seems to be looking for a way to navigate both Anne Bonny’s story and her own life. The poems in this section are smartly complicated, swimming between admiration and pity, fierceness and vulnerability, romance and destruction. In one poem, the speaker tells Anne Bonny, “All the things I wish for seem to be things I’m ashamed to be wanting in the first place so when I get them I can’t enjoy them. Have you ever had this problem?” I can’t help but smile at a speaker who goes to a pirate as a kind of Dear Abby, looking for advice about life. What can Anne Bonny tell her but:

When you feel something pulling you under
you look to me
as if I can tell you what freedom is,
but I can’t give you your sea legs.
You have to steal them from me.

Hyslop sees and avoids the trap of casting Bonny as either a victim or a hero. She recognizes that the only Anne Bonny we can know is one from a story we tell ourselves, a story the speaker of the poems is telling herself and the reader at the same time. A story gathered from fragments of history and herself combined into a narrative that defies resolution. These poems breach time and manage a tragic immediacy that keeps us wanting to know more. By the end of the sequence, Anne Bonny has pirated herself out of the story:

But it’s too late. She’s already disappearing
into the marginal space between
ocean and sky.
Anne Bonny sails herself like a boat
out of the stack of history books I’m holding in my arms.

In the subsequent sections of the book, Hyslop turns her lens to more personal territory, exploring family history, mythology, and the very idea of “femaleness” in poems that are raw, risky, and sharply imaginative. Many of these poems read as a bridging between youth and adulthood. Poems like “Frankenstein,” “A Small Madness,” and “Playing Make-Believe With My Mother’s Choices” show speakers who are attempting to make sense of family history. They ask, How did you do it? How will I do it? And the answers are never easy. In these poems, we see a woman becoming a woman. One who sees that life is fucking complicated; so much more complicated than we thought it would be when we were young and “just wanted a normal life.”

In places, the poems feel over-intellectualized, becoming commentary on ideas or emotions rather than the “thing” itself. In these moments, the poems lose some immediacy, waylaid by a speaker who seems almost too smart for her own good. So, we get lines like:

Biology bickers with existential experience.
Later sends flowers and an underdeveloped theory
of the relation of sex to brain chemistry.

Yet, even these sections can read as an alternative attempt to understand, a stepping back from emotion to see if reason or logic can help navigate the complexities of experience. Eventually, we see that, like with Anne Bonny, our lives inevitably become only the stories we tell ourselves about what is happening to us. Our choices lie in how we relate to those experiences and where we choose to draw the always shifting X that marks our identity. Hyslop’s debut collection illuminates both an approach to life and an approach to poetry that is worth exploring more fully.

Related Posts:

• Burn This House by Kelly Davio
• “Many Ways to Say It” by Eva Saulitis
• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger

Saulitis writes poems that are full of nuance and subtle shades of emotion. She recognizes the “missed pleasure blossoming / at the edge of everything / familiar.” Her poems entice and invite us to see beyond the way science and even religion have taught us to relate to nature and to recognize our own desire to be seduced by its mysteries. In one of my favorite poems from the book, “Maybe I’ll (Go),” she presents this longing as a lover we might try to resist, but who is calling to us from the inside:

There’s a woods in my brain,
I think I know. I don’t know.
There’s someone who goes,
and she’s not me. She leaves
the bucket under the tree,
follows the tracks he’s trampled for her
in the decomposing snow.

Saulitis’s imagining of this shadow world, this unnamable place we can only find in ourselves, is haunting, erotic, and irresistible. She seems to be telling us in every poem: There is a world next to this world. It is hidden, but, any minute, you could fall into it, so you’d better prepare yourself. When that happens, the things you thought you knew will be of no use and you will have to learn a new way to see, a new way to say it all.

Saulitis is intimate with names of the plants, animals, and minerals that inhabit her surroundings and her poems, but she also knows that those names are often an inadequate way to express the magic under the surface. She recognizes that behind every name is something that cannot be said. This idea is played out in the second section of the book, which presents the character of Linnaeus (the father of scientific taxonomy) as a sort of King Lear figure, taken up with nomenclature and sexual classification (“As he looked // he touched. As he touched he named. As he named everything / changed.”), which, Saulitis seems to suggest, is a kind of madness. She writes, “Winter will / confound you, nature’s butcher’s block / unman the names and ranks.” Nature does not know nor need our names. Each thing is only itself:

No, adamant, it’s a pond,
no stranger, it’s nature actual, unnamed,
unmanned, no metaphor, no lure,
a pond drinking in desire
as only water can . . .

Set against Linnaeus is the persona of Cordelia, a daughter who refuses to submit to this vision of the world, to the role she is being asked to play. Saulitis deftly weaves images of domesticity, submission, and wild longing into poems that take the traditional correlation between women and the natural world to a new level. She draws more than the simple equals sign that says both women and nature have been subjugated, boxed in, and brutalized. Instead, she claims the power of that connection: “go girl, disappear / into that leaf-thrash vegetal / mosh-pit, tangled, but with openings, / openings, everywhere:” Ultimately, the Cordelia persona moves past the Linnaeus/father figure and becomes herself that entry point between what we think we know about the world and everything that remains secret and shadowed. She writes:

… I stopped. But my other self, the third person,
she got up. There was a smell like overturned peat. She forgot
all the names. She was tree & she was splayed,
like the fern. Pond and bog flame. Observed, observer, leaf
& lover. She was witness. She was water.

Saulitis forces us to face the edge—the place where our knowledge, skill, and imagined power is going to fail us. The places that are here and now, around and inside us, that we will never know on a rational or critical level. The places we don’t even have words for:

a place where knowing
ends, where language founders,

where the wind carries off all her word
endings. Remember that edge,

ships plunging off explorer’s maps,
& someone’s marked the margin: Here there be … ?

But the crucial part’s worn away–?
Remember? That’s where she begins.

This is the place Saulitis invites us to begin as well. She recognizes that we all live in this concrete world of words and things, of GPS and pollywog, of shrew’s den and feng shui, but that world can’t be the one that we end in. We must move past it, see through it, understand that the deeper we dig, the more is revealed. Everything is saying something and part of our work is to learn that language beyond names and to accept that we will never fully know it. Saulitis writes these poems that are like messages from the dark, lush country inside us, carried by “that nameless bird in the morning.”

Related Posts:

• Burn This House by Kelly Davio
• Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You by Keely Hyslop
• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger