In
the Airport
A man called Dad walks
by
then another one does. Dad,
you say
and he turns, forever
turning, forever
being called. Dad, he
turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his
face a moving
wreck of skin, a
gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in
two, an animal
that can’t escape the
field.
Denver poet Eleni Sikelianos’ seventh trade poetry collection is The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Minneapolis MN: Coffee
House Press, 2013). Before this, I’ve been aware of a number of her titles,
including her infamous The California Poem (Coffee House Press, 2004), but have only read her “hybrid memoir,” The Book of Jon (San Francisco CA: City
Lights Books, 2004). Discovered in a used bookstore in New Orleans, The Book of Jon is a book that discusses
and explores her complicated relationship with her late father, a book that
adds colour to this new collection, specifically poems such as “In the Airport,”
adding entire layers that otherwise might remain hidden, or merely suggested. After
reading The Book of Jon, it would be
impossible to read such a poem without that pallor, and perhaps that is entirely
the point. Perhaps this is the author detailing her “living and dead”
throughout lyric passages that suggest, refer, discuss, explore and outright
explain, running as a personal thread through the entirely of her writing, and
she dedicates this collection to five different names, including Poppy
Sikelianos (1951 – 2007). Sikelianos’ poems in this collection explore the
length of the lyric sentence, stretching the cadence of the line, as in the
poem “Charlene is talking about,” that begins: “Thundersnow, and the way a man
can smell like a moon, a woman / like a man; the smell is her shadow; sound is
[.]” Her poems write of the living and the dead, of those lost, of dying, of
living in the world, and states of being, such as in the poem “An And and Thought,”
that begins:
I found an and
and thought
what if this were
America, this room?
I found an if and
if it were France?
Let
us go on cultivating these fields of error
There
is the element of the collage to her poems, as though the poems themselves aren’t
enough to contain all that Sikelianos puts into them, helping to suggest that
the poems are instead all part of some larger container. The poems suggest that
her unit of composition is not the individual poem but the book as a whole,
allowing the collage to read as a deeper and far more complex tapestry. As she
writes in the poem “Shadow Zoo”: “These are the things that detain the soul of
the mind: / Shadows, flames, trees, columns, dolls, pools, children, Polaroids,
carbon, waste // Bluff and counterbluff thrown across the oceans streak their
shadows sea-bottom and /// if your shadow lit / lit up / if your shadow were
aflame [.]” The details are too many to count, and she carves each one with
care, adding and collecting and crafting into a remarkably detailed and expansive canvas. Sometimes there are details that pass quickly by, as others
catch and refuse to let go, whether “my fact decayed in the light” that ends
the poem “Black-Out Fabric — What I Found There,” or “Make a poem / that
descends in the mirror […] / then comes back out” that opens her poem “Instructions.”
The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead reads a collection of poems that are exactly what the title tells us:
poems exploring the way that we live in the world, as well as touching upon large
abstract concepts of death, the heart and the soul), and how we remember those
and what has long passed by. This book has a very large heart, and one that
contains multitudes.
Bird
& Meat Subject
My little bird &
meat subject
little human eye unhinging like a door
I’m addressing you & you are the title
my little bird-&-meat
The skin slips off by a strange
arrangement
like a
boat that begins to take water
before the storm —
the words
in my throats
once sure as cream
spinning the human
voice
around the atom, cracks
it
my little
bird-&-meat
(holds out her hand,
bends her fingers), say hello
to this time-eating
spider
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