Aaron McCollough, Salms

 

Good morning, shadows
who love us, how we look,
the ripple
around the actual coast of our day

Without knowing our true place,
I pull at my face
Antenna feels the distance
in an open door

Pure tension. Under gravity.
All of what we do is small,
demoralizing.

I organized my day around
nothing, conjuring nothing,
and you actually appeared (“FIRST FORM”)

Tennessee poet and publisher Aaron McCollough’s latest is Salms (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2024), published as part of University of Iowa Press’ Kuhl House Poets series. I seem to be quite behind on McCollough’s work, having only sketched out a few notes on his third collection, Little Ease (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2006) [see my review of such here], having completely missed out, it would seem, on his Welkin (Ahsahta Press, 2002), Double Venus (Salt Publishing, 2033), No Grave Can Hold My Body Down (Ahsahta Press, 2011), Underlight (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012) and Rank (University of Iowa Press, 2015). Where have I been, one might ask? Composed across four section-clusters of short lyrics—“A MIRROR,” “SALM,” “THE SURVIVAL OF IMAGES” and “MERE”—with opening sequence “FIRST FORM,” the poems assembled across Salms suggest themselves as a blending of poems, song and prayer. As Sally Keith offers as part of her back cover blurb, Salms “[…] is as attentive to the merging of poems and psalms as it is to the nearly indistinguishable sound of salms and songs.” Just listen to the music of the narrative in the centre of the poem “The Wonderful Wood: A Mirror,” the opening of a series of poems with “A Mirror” suffixing or subtitling their titles:

One lived with her grandmother who was not well. In a lonely
cottage she can’t go, nowhere to go and no one to send her.
Every space between people and things her hazard. The world
we find is not reassuring, certainly. Qualities, bodies, and time.
They were too poor, so they hide in the cottage where they
earned their bread through piecework and spinning. The only
world. They worked with their hands in the cottage near a
wonderful wood no one dares go into.
      Light reflected in the open stream

I’m intrigued by the heft of his prose poems, even across poems with line breaks or look akin to more traditionally-set lyrics. These are poems of beginnings, each allowing the unfolding unto anything and everything across a structure of heartfelt singing, a musical lyric through the details of memory, childhood recollection, travel stories, ordinary moments and contemporary truths. “Visiting a friend of my mother’s in Atlanta,” the cool lyrics of “salm 12.13 resurrection, imperfect.” begins, “it was a boy I never / met again who showed me an illustration from one of his / father’s books depicting rear entry, saying that’s what your / parents do, leaving me dismayed and lonely in my universe. // And then Bucky and I saw two dogs in a bend in the road, / and I thought so that’s it, and was calm.” Through McCollough’s lyrics, there is the depiction and the reflection, and how things are recollected, rooted and turned; how stories get told, one might say. How moments are held, or displayed. “In a place famous for great wind / it turns on.” opens the short lyric “Wind,” a poem, nearly a dozen lines further, ends with the precise moment of this: “Until the fervor passes, and what’s left / is everyday still.” What is everyday, as he writes. Still.