Lily Brown, BLADE WORK

 

 

I heard the voice of reason
swerve boneward as it mouthed
the high hills of Art.
I know both sides:
the violence of artifact
and the living tree,
airy branches full of weeds.
Once a sitting thing in a thing
that stuck me back, I walk
straight out in heavy rain,
trying not to aim,
his lungs gum-thick,
each word towed out with a chain
pulled simultaneously back.
I make another motion,
send a jagged gift. (“Venus Transit”)

I’ve been an admirer of the work of American poet Lily Brown, a poet and writing teacher currently based in Maine [see her 12 or 20 questions here] ever since discovering her work through the chapbook Being One (Brave Men, 2011) [see my review of such here]. That particular title was soon followed by her full-length debut, Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) [see my review of such here] as well as a further handful of chapbooks, including The Haptic Cold (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Her latest collection, her second full-length, is BLADE WORK (Anderson SC: Parlor Press, 2025), produced as Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize, as selected by Carl Phillips. I’m amazed at the carved sharpness and meditative distances travelled across her purposeful, tactful lyrics. Through Brown, every word, line and step is deliberately and carefully set, but with such a cadence of ease, composing poems of disruption, description and a hint of surrealism, set in pure stone. “The horse gallops / fog under its chin,” she writes, to open the poem “After Susan Rothenberg’s Untitled Drawing, No. 41, 1977,” “behind a hind leg, / haze in parts erased. / The smudge in the body’s / portioned air. Darwin / threw lizards / by the tail / into the ocean / to find out if they swim.” There’s such a clarity, a density, to her poems, one that allows for stunning moments, the narratives of her poems accumulating with such force into perfect phrases, perfect landings. As the second half of her short poem “Transparency” offers: “All day I splinter leaves / with my feet, conduct them // in, singed flags. / I think I see you in the back window, // waving there, your show moving / west then east. // Torso turns to see // how great a distance / I earned to make.” The underplayed power of her poems are enormous, landing her endings with incredible grace, the click of a latch to know that door is now closed. “Give some back to the mapland.” She writes, to open “The Complete Poems,” a piece composed “after Elizabeth Bishop.” “Material qualities, stammering / repetition. More interested / in atmosphere, leaf and cloud, / than clock-like architecture’s alarms.”

Carly Joy Miller, Ceremonial

Weathered Porch

When my grandmother fell through

the floorboards, she cupped her hands

to create an echo that crosses

five acres of cows, and they don’t know how

to listen. Cows don’t know how to move

closer in open fields. They need

whispers in their ears. Branding irons

or cracked whips taught them

how pain sounds—a bellow

from the fourth stomach. When her throat

dried, she settled for listening.

What she heard before having a body:

the rumbling of dirt, shuffling

of the many-headed rush,

a voice calling I’m sorry over

the cows’ shuffling weight.

Winner of The 2017 Orison Poetry Prize, as selected by Carl Phillips, is New York poet and editor Carly Joy Miller’s full-length debut, the poetry title Ceremonial (Asheville NC: Orison Books, 2018). The collection opens with a glowing introduction by Ilya Kaminsky, that includes:

            Carly Joy Miller often begins her poems with the seduction of tone: she is playful and ruinous at the same time. “I have always been the girl in the wrong / clothes for spring,” she starts the poem, in a matter-of-fact tone. “Last week I hunted the blond boys / who hunted a doe.” That catches the eye. But what follows is working on a much deeper, stranger register: “I let out a dry cry. / Only the worms could hear me. / I’ve been that low.” What a curious marriage of O’Hara and Plath! And Amy Gerstler! And the Witches’ words in Macbeth!

I was struck by many of the poems in this collection, but there were times that I wanted more from some of them; times I felt that the poems didn’t go far enough, such as the poem “Letter to Body Made Breath,” which ended on a short sequence that left me feeling short-changed: “Dress billow-whips // my knees. Breathe.: / body arch. Breathe.” In a way, my frustration from such small moments come from seeing just how capable Miller’s work is, and how much better a poet she is, and could be. On the whole, this collection is sharp, wickedly smart and playfully confident, and the variety of structures she plays with, utilizing shifts in line breaks, rhythm and even prose structures, throughout the collection made up for any shortfalls I might be imagining. Her poems are restless, moving through myth and mantra, fable and consequence, seeking out the closest thing to truth that might be possible. Perhaps I make too much of a small thing? As the last quarter of the poem “Fable” reads:

Cry one tear is she is quick enough

to wipe it away. It could freeze on her cheek

and she doesn’t need a mark for loss

visible on her face. The sun fell. She thought

of a swan tucking beak into wing. That’s

what all days must be like. All fall gracefully.

She was mistaken. If she’d just looked up

she could have saved him. Someone else

will find him. Someone else will drag him home.