Liz Countryman, Green Island: Poems

 

Now, to be 40 is to be a comb someone else’s hair moves through.

I sense but can’t describe some other, newer kind of openness
contorting me—

Now when I set the cereal boxes on the counter
when I make a shape of them

what prior arrangement—what impulse disguised as practicality—
do I refute? And what of it?
do I refute, and what of it do I carry forward?

What of that stubborn shape around me back then
Do I know replicate, even as I refute it?
Or has one simply grown up from beneath the other
But stayed one thing

Like the skin of a hand? (“NARRATIVE POEM”)

The latest from South Carolina poet and OVERSOUND co-editor/co-publisher Liz Countryman is Green Island: Poems (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2024), following on the heels of her full-length debut, A Forest Almost (Boulder CO: Subito Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]. Winner of the Berkshire Prize through Tupelo Press, as judged by Julie Carr (Countryman’s debut was also a prize-winner, published as part of the 2016 Subito Press Poetry Prize), Green Island is a collection made up of seventeen poems set in two clusters on either side of a longer sequence. Throughout the collection, I’m intrigued at how each of her poems stretch to articulate the length and breadth of a landscape, both internal and external. “The saddest thing,” she writes, as part of the sequence “A CLEARING,” set in the centre, the emotional eye, of the collection, “when someone’s gone, is land. // No amount of accuracy will bring what I see closer. // Its arms seem open but it keeps receding as I move.”

There is a patter that connects her domestic to her physical landscape, holding the two as not separate, but intricately connected. “I felt the authority of the arrangement: // how flowers with light behind them,” she writes, to open the six-page poem “NARRATIVE POEM,” “hanging plants / near the phone in our house / framed that phone, the window, // our family dog chained in the shade of pines / and soft needles beyond the glass. // The phone like a faucet. / A little grime in its grooves.” Countryman writes in meditative stretches, lines collected into clusters around a thought or a series of thoughts that cohere into something larger, offering meditations of walking, of moments, across great distances, and narratives-as-accumulation. One step follows another across these poems, offering moments stretched out, the big canvas of constellation that makes up this collection. “I sweep a lot of gripes around the floor,” she writes, as part of the poem “HOMEOWNER,” “thanking each Cheerio with trepidation.”