Elizabeth Robinson, Thirst & Surfeit

 

Mary Reade

While I was captive,
I saw that horizon rhymes with reason.

And like so, the shape of the roof
beckons the hull of a boat.

It’s the sun who decides, in the end,
whether the sea is a plateau or a well and how
such will clang on the atmosphere.

I was captive until I fell off the edge where the great heat
made me captain

of its lull and its whitecap.

I am mistress, now, of similarities.
My reason is to take and take now
as the horizon takes from me

or toward:

the bowed edge of a vessel never
secure or heal. The untoward advance

of light arrests

this surface as given.

Zig-zagging freedom to illumine
what I’ve wrested.

Reason rejects the curve.

The latest from American poet and editor Elizabeth Robinson is the collection Thirst & Surfeit (High Point NC: Threadsuns, 2023), a collection that follows a sequence of historical threads, offering themes-as-section titles, seven in all: “The Bog Traverse 1200-600 B.C.E.,” “Hovenweep 1200-1300 C.E.,” “Anne Hutchinson 1591-1643,” “Two Pirates 1690-1782,” “Ferdinand Gregorovius 1821-1891,” “The Canudos Rebellion, Brazil 1893-1897” and “2023,” a section that holds but the single poem “Legion.” There’s an incredible precision to these pieces, an extended stretch of poems on exploration and response across the veil of what might appear to be a scattered list of historical moments and eras. What holds these different time-periods together? “What we’ve shared in common / has made us sink.” she writes, to open the poem “Disappearance,” set as part of the penultimate section. “The earth floor, / swept clean so many times / clings to speech. Ubiquitous // sunlight / shows us these particles // as we dwindle beneath them.” Again, what ties these periods together? “History,” as the cover flap of the collection offers, “like ‘light untied and undone,’ disperses itself across time and memory. The poems in Thirst & Surfeit reach into these fragments to interpret and sing interactions of human and environment, spirit and subsistence.” One might suggest that the connecting tissue between time-periods and their resulting lyrics are simply Robinson’s approach and attentions, striking lyrics on how so much remains unchanged between such temporal lengths, such as the weight of a moment, or how uncertainty and accountability are as much explored as the details of each particular era, as the opening poem of the second section reads:

You are not now what you were meant to be. And this is why mirages are without irony.

So hurry: the precipate falls hard onto forgetful dirt. The external, like rain, jars you.

There are stretches of miles, of the unexpected; they menace and recant. You prefer that the haste drop you off like a passenger, into tedium. You are in brambles that annoy but do not scratch.

 

A cartoonish body waits outside yours, whistling and smirking.

The precipitous

falls sodden-to-itself, to shoulders like yours, piggyback.
Hard. Finally, hurtful: this patience.
The trees named for Joshua pick up their arms, plainly out of obedience.

There is an interesting structural shift in this collection, beyond what she’s worked in some of her more recent collections, composing a handful of collections via short lyric response poems, each titled on the variation of “On _____,” from her Excursive (New York NY: Roof Books, 2023) [see my review of such here] and On Ghosts (Solid Objects, 2013) [see my review of such here]. The poems of Thirst & Surfeit offer a blend of structures, from the fragmented long-poem effect of the second section, the self-contained compactness of the prose poems that make up the book’s opening section, to the dual pirate poems that deliberately work to play off each other. The effect is curious, akin to an anthology of sorts, as though the form through which she responds is as important a shift as her temporal zones and subject matter. “We measure vastness by the limit of our mortal life.” She writes, to open the poem “Salvation,” set as part of the “Anne Hutchinson” section. “I would have you look, as example, at the face of the clock. It is a face, // even as it cherishes its own absent mouth and closed eyes. Its example we // should emulate.” It is almost as though she is attempting to capture something larger, and ongoing, with each collection that preceded this one all part of what went into this singular and multitudinous work, a heft of lyric across eighty pages.