Lindsay Turner, Songs & Ballads

THE NEW FOREST

and then Sunday we went to see

the forest by the lake the new forest

the low forest the after-dinner forest the for-profit forest

the forest upwards beside the deep dark

dark forest don’t tell me what I’ll remember

or regret later forest we saw

the forest

of reminders the forest turned

to countings mansions exhibitions

expositions the old floor glorious

fading in sun the carpets forest

we went to see in the car growing into our projections forest

darker the dark strip in the lake the forest projecting an illusion

forest depth

projected onto our real depth the lake showing

the dark the dark forest the forest

decided the forest

planted for the futures forest

that doesn’t accrue forest planted to grow

into what doesn’t exist now forest

of futures forest

on Sunday getting darker forest deforested

landing the new forest makes it

worth it light left now in the forest

standing up

Greenville, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner’s full-length poetry debut is the collection Songs & Ballads (Brooklyn NY: The Prelude Press LLC, 2018). Songs & Ballads weaves together lovely elements of prose and lyric, writing the lake and the woods, composing songs that work against the distance between humanity and nature. Turner mourns the erosion of what she praises, and her songs lament and praise in turns seductive, sensual and jarring. As she writes in the poem “SONG OF THE TOWNS”: “Water water everywhere // But thinking does not make it so // The grave officials say, / shore up the bottom line.” The idea of the “song” holding a series of truths, histories and commentaries is, obviously, one of the oldest methods of record-keeping and composition, and Turner writes her own Songs & Ballads with that in mind, combined with a deeply engaged ecopoetic. As she asks: how does the heart continue, when the earth can no longer sustain itself, let alone the body?

woke myself up saying this is the worst movie I have ever seen, before that in the dream the patriarch had fired the boy who had tasted his food for toxins so we knew it was the end of that house with its windows open above a prime curve of the sea, it’s possible that “worst” was supposed to have been “saddest”

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but how to make them see the ballad in all this, like it’s me, like a companion interlocutor or elderly relative, the four beats with all our hands held around them like several people holding a small heavy alarm clock, like the particles washed off into the lakes but still cardinal, get in things, could damage, could produce (“SONG OF VISUAL DIFFICULTY”)