Emily Skaja, Black Lake: poems

 

I let rain trample me flat
as a cluster of ditch lilies
while I breathe in
the recommended exhaust. 

Anesthesia sloughs off my skin
so a forge of white heat
can shine up my skeleton,
making me new. 

As that fucker Ezra Pound insisted. (“Make It New”)

The second full-length collection from Memphis-based poet Emily Skaja, following Brute (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2019), is Black Lake: poems (Graywolf Press, 2026), a book-length suite that works through the spectrum of grief through the loss of a child. “You lived & died in one long summer.” she writes, to open the poem “Future Fig,” a poem that also offers, a bit further on: “I once killed three summers of tomato plants / before I found, to my surprise, / a whole uninvited cucumber / shoved up out of a crack in the concrete. // This is the kind of thing, in my era / of grieving, that passes for parable.” Organized across five numbered section-clusters of first-person lyrics, Skaja composes poems almost as short scenes or thought narratives, the collection as a whole providing a narrative through-line of enough grief that one could get entirely lost within it. And yet, she does not, finding the only way past grief is through. As the poem “Black lake, black boat,” early on in the collection, begins: “black fog I can’t find my way / through. Black trees, black / moon. I once knew the sky / from the water. This course / I remember, its narrowing. / How I crept my way down / the ladder like clutching / the gluey rungs of a throat.”

Set in five numbered section-clusters of lyrics, there’s a clear-eyed precision to Skaja’s articulations on and around grief, articulated best, perhaps, through this section of the three-page poem “What’ll It Be, Hon,” that reads: “It wasn’t a black hole of depression / so much as an all-night diner of depression / & I’d been going there as a regular // for months—eating the icebox pie, drinking / the hot-dog coffee, calling everyone Rita— / when suddenly a whole crowd of people // joined me in my spot. It turned out, / depression was on trend.” These poems work through the lengthy and difficult trajectory through grief, a relationship that can’t help but change, over time, and articulated very different than the work of, say, South Bend, Indiana poet Joyelle McSweeney [see my review of her latest here], who has also written extensively across the grief of losing a child. Sometimes the worst part of grief, as she articulates moving through election day, the Bible Belt, poetry and spring, is that it occurs during and across normal life, both seemingly unaffected by the other. Or there is Skaja’s poem “Poetry Makes Nothing Happen,” referencing W.H. Auden’s infamous line from his 1939 poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” As Skaja’s poem reads, in full:

Black lake of sorrow, unholy excess,
to you I confess my shame—I wanted
to draw a line around the violence
of the world, contain it in language,
let cruelty take someone else’s hand
& turn my back on it to save
this single square of tenderness
for myself. For that to be possible.
Such important work, this little art
of divining omens in the fire
only after it swallows everything.
Turning to no one to say, Look—
when I point to blood in a black puddle,
at the way it reflects the stars.