Lisa Samuels, Livestream

 

Ligature

the water is eating the sun
  chomping it into tiny bits
sea or tune or new design
open tratten rock face
  wet with shadow this side
steel spray lings the curve
and shaking it the boat
picks up the island from her
  mouth cage loosening
halfway cross now
scatter opt her brow
  words come in back steel
like arithmetic it’s all over
for the water’s pride
  chomp chomp

The latest from poet Lisa Samuels, following titles such as Foreign Native (Black Radish Books, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Breach (Norwich England: Boiler House Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], is Livestream (2023), her seventh poetry book from UK publisher Shearsman Books. The collection is described on the back cover as “digital capture thrown elsewhere, body fluids that charge being and planetary liquid flows. Livestream’s poetry entangles with those phenomena. The poems erupt, stagger, hold, and reflect as they evoke events and responses distributed through bodies and ethical borders.” The short lyrics of Livestream are clustered into quarters: four sections, each of which open with a black-and-white digital image, offering the suggestion that the poems within each section respond, or bounce of, said image. These images, according to the table of contents, are titled “floater,” “diorama,” “caliber” and “ganglion,” and the poems that follow suggest a book-length trajectory of responses, quartering this suite of short lyric bursts of rhythm, sound and meaning. “Scouring the planet’s nerve geometry / in the same speak-shore out of which / some clods turn on the side to rest,” the opening poem, “Gorge time,” reads, “the double-touch veins umwelt / our of which throbs the voice is / over-faint turns on its side to speak [.]”

Samuels’ poems, however they might be shaped, begin at a moment and the rush forward from that singular point, headlong into a lyric running across a myriad of sound, rhythm and reference, very much in the vein of one thought or sound immediately following another. “Even if a cold / statute really is curative you believe it,” the poem “Aquifer” offers, “its closeness to your feeling bears relief.” Hers is a lyric populated with physicality from starts and air to limbs and nervous fictions, allowing meaning to emerge out of what might, at first, appear a jumble but is filled with purpose, akin to certain of the language poets, whether Stephen Cain or Meredith Quartermain, allowing a way through the collision of sound and meaning into something far larger, just on the other side. Or, as the poem “Pitch in the dark” ends:

        Living specific nervous fictions
we said    tall and beautiful withers
a long tail for a clear advantage
airborn    sprecht