Dad says a Paterson man
lost his mind
On the George
Washington Bridge
Another urge to span a
gap
Another ride along this
terminal moraine.
Now I keep an eye on
the break-down lane
For people who may need
my help specifically
But the edge of the
world is speeding (“Causeway”)
Northampton, Massachusetts Lesley Yalen’s first trade collection of poetry is The Hearts of Vikings (Boston MA:
Natural History Press, 2015). The author of a small handful of poetry
chapbooks, including This Elizabeth
(Minus House Press, 2007) and the
beginning in (minutes BOOKS, 2011), there have been more than a few of us
clamouring for a first collection to appear. Composed in four sections—“Causeway,”
“The Beginning In,” “The Hearts of Vikings” and “Kaddish”—there is something of
the collected-chapbooks feel to The
Hearts of Vikings, which may or may not even be true (a chicken-or-egg
idea: did the book structure pre-date the excision into chapbook manuscripts,
or the other way around?), but something that my prior knowledge of her work is
distracting me towards. Still, such books can make for entirely cohesive
collections, such as, for example, Toronto poet Kevin Connolly’s long-ago first, Asphalt Cigar (Toronto ON:
Coach House Press, 1995).
The
squares are cut out, so that the
men
stand in them firmly.
When you die. When I feel
no quivering leaf
or breath. When finally
deprived.
And the construction
and the process of the proof.
And afraid. And Beethoven
composed his
music for his God. When
forced to be born
all alone again. All
normal and alone. When
without a thought of
authorship you slip all
egress from the heavily
bolted earth, when
explosions are tearing
holes in iron and
balancing on a peg is
no option. When tea
is served on a
patternless dress, various ladies
introduced to me by
name. At the
borderland of grammar.
And I can’t seem
to catch their names
over the hearing.
Much
of what I’ve seen of her work so far (and this book is no exception) seems to
favour the sequence, whether constructing a small unit out of untitled
fragments, or out of titled poems, both of which manage to accumulate into
something larger, abstract and singular. Her poems might be built with a larger
framework in mind, but she manages to leave incredible, open spaces between her
lines and stanzas, allowing her poems a near-excess of breath, and therefore,
life. Yalen’s The Hearts of Vikings writes
out a series of shifts, revisions, abstracts and the texture of dreams, set as
much in the tangible as in the intangible, slipping even in the grip of her incredible
lines. One might say that the entire collection articulates an attempt towards
writing out the slippages of identity, from the “Kaddish” that ends the book to
the poem “The New World,” that opens the collection: “The passage was a middle
whose end was me // let me revise [.]” Does writing out the whom and the what
cement, or even reduce, identity, or simply highlight the impossibilities of
writing? Who are you, really?
People had texture,
dimension, and mass
If you hurled a person
at another, it hurt
If you removed a person
from a scene, gone.
A person could be
embellished, disassembled,
Or held, but it couldn’t
slip through fingers
Or be in two places
now,
In your lungs or
written down,
Sung or eternal or
repeated.
Every thing had an
inside and a skin,
A face and a tail,
An origin, a due date,
an appearance, and dreams.
A box divided all space
Into two areas, no
matter where you put it
It insisted on making
this distinction.
A person took its place
among things. (“The Beginning In”)
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