Marcella Durand, A Winter Triangle

 

In time of strange effusion, is it allowed
to count to 12 again or must I conform to
beat of 8, deemed most effective to convey
within medium of letters following one after
another doubled beat of heart before escaping
past reach of bran: but who says brain, furrowed
with infinite folds, can’t follow 12 syllable past end

 

  

 

of line into misty realms, who says gray can’t be
million shades of water, cloud and winter, who says
winter is not warmer now in changing skies, who
says every shade of color isn’t more attractive than
monotones that dull our eyes and train our tongues to
beats that end before brain and much less heart begin? (“automata of a perpetual flute”)

I’m attempting to catch up on my reading of American poet Marcella Durand’s work, having recently attended The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry (co-edited with Jennifer Firestone; MIT Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], but still very behind on her numerous other titles, such as Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem, 2008), Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.) (joca seria, 2016), Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017) and To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2021). As part of this attempt, I’ve been moving through her latest, the book-length lyric suite A Winter Triangle (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2025). Winner of the 2023-24 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, as selected by Srikanth Reddy [see my review of one of his recent here], A Winter Triangle is a collection composed and constructed as a kind of book-length constellation across boundless space. “now is the time to gesture toward a triangle,” she writes, to open the third section, “a winter triangle,” “a cold triangle not just because it appears / during the winter but / because it is in space very cold / and yet for seconds people seem to survive [.]” Across a triptych of extended sections, A Winter Triangle writes out a lyric expansiveness, large enough that, at times, one can’t see the edge. “is of the north,” begins the poem “Septentrional,” a poem named for a form she’s developed across this collection, “is of the seven stars of / Ursa Major: earth turns north / to constellation—turns to / forests, desert tundra and / settlements, darkness of / land contrasted with sea.” As the back cover provides, A Winter Triangle

[…] explores poetic space and forms amid the infinite possibilities of composition and change. Composed of three parts, or “points,” like its namesake asterism this collection is inspired by Stephane Mallarmé’s idea of composting poetry from the “senseless splendor” of the skies, as well as the designs for automata by twelfth-century inventor and engineer Ismail al-Jazari, and mythological depictions of Sirius, the dog/wolf star, as both a keeper of order and the agent of chaos and energy.

As Srikanth Reddy writes as part of his “Foreword” to the collection: “Like Paradise Lost and Un coup de dés, Durand’s extraordinary book transports us to a realm ‘where numbers end. / And begin again.’ One name for this ‘where’ might be God. Or mathematics. Or another, with apologies to Rimbaud, might oneself. ‘One has a chance to transform into zero,’ Durand observes, ‘if one takes oneself away from one.’” Across sections “automata of a perpetual flame,” “Septentrional” and “a winter triangle,” Durand writes her lyric around a particular shape, around the shape of an idea, attending facts and perspectives across a pinpoint of sequenced language. “Poetry is silence’s / musician and in // painting corners / malachite against // vermillion,” the poem “what noise of circles” begins, “while / orange springs.” It is fascinating the scope, the scale, of this collection; not just how her lyric outlines an idea but a lyric that writes out, around and through her subject, allowing the umbrella as a kind of touchstone, beyond which all other possibilities might find ground. Or, as poem “the etiquette of scribes” reads:

Understand the proportion of one letter to another
and of your emotion in proportion to mine; this selfishness
is intolerable! I deserve better missive, or an apology
the depth of an ocean comprised of centuries
of hurricanes of tears, oceanic sobbing and contrition,
clouds eternally closing over the globe, hunkering
down in an earth of mud sinking into its own regret
over having treated me so very badly!