Tracy Zeman, Interglacial

 

I wake early & in all that black    leave home
moisture in the air made visible by clouds      blue coolness
rogue waves borrowing form from the troposphere
harlequin in flight      floating world of coots canvasbacks
& hooded mergansers      white moon ringed with black
we peddle the rocky berm counting ducks 

census of species in a long series of signs 

                        daughter’s stars thinly inked
she sings while she draws      cattail      tree swallow
song sparrow’s burnt streaks a sunburst from beak to chest
like the cumulus along the lake’s perimeter
drifting & flattening into nothing into
a smooth white haze (“POINTE MOUILLEE”)

The second full-length collection by Michigan-based poet Tracy Zeman, following Empire (Anderson SC: Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2020), is the Great Lakes book-length suite Interglacial (Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2026). “Her little scrawl at the edge of my notebook / while I am away,” she writes, as part of the short sequence “SUPERIOR,” “watching brown waves / crash against cold beach [.]” I’m intrigued by these lyric moments held in temporal and geographic space, in stasis; held and turned in the light, in the blink of an eye. There’s a narrative thickness to these pieces, a density combined with light touch, writing out landscape and ecology, habit and habitat and habitation. A way in which this poem-sequence extends into a single piece across the length and breath of the collection. While there are comparisons one can make to such as Lorine Niedecker’s infamous “Lake Superior,” the lyrics of Zeman’s Interglacial are more delicate, lyric; offering a particular tone, certainly, but one that extends across a far broader landscape, setting precisions against each other, from stone to the narrator’s daughter and dog to the water’s edge. “Sand everywhere,” she writes, as part of “THEANO POINT,” “morning white pine mist / floating over point    ocean-sound // mined crater on overlook [.]” Zeman’s lyrics, as well, echo variations I’ve seen over the years on the English-language adaptation of the utanikki—a poetic journal that includes haiku chasers—with variations over the years by Canadian poets Roy Miki, bpNichol, Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka, among others, combining these elements with articulations of accumulated fragment, sequence and the book-length lyric meditation. There is an enormous amount of detail here, with much to admire and appreciate, allowing the phrases and sentences to roll like waves, perhaps. Or, as part of the sequence “NORTH”:

Shale shaped by water into river valleys
my canoe seemed as if it hung suspended
in that element        rough-hewn forts built by fur-traders
& black robes      longboats portaging
smooth gray & pink undulated rocks whirl up
to the forest surface      Precambrian remnants 

 

gneiss shot
with granite