Sarah Blake, In Spring Time

 

 

12.

The bird spirit understands that her new form is more beautiful. Even
if it is less seen.

And she flies so easily. Minutes ago she flew right under a bird of prey.

Hours ago she was above the clouds. The air was thin. The stars and
moon were close.

Her body has been singing to her from under the earth.

The song is sad, and when she sings, a whistling noise leaves her
torn stomach.

The mismatched notes of her grieving body are the saddest of all.

The third poetry collection from American expatriate Sarah Blake, a poet and fiction writer currently living outside of London, England, is In Spring Time (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), following on the heels of her Mr. West (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Let’s Not Live on Earth (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) [see my review of such here]. In Spring Time is composed as a book-length suite via a sequence of sixty numbered poems that loosely thread in, across and through the collection, grouped together across four numbered sections (“DAY 1,” “DAY 2,” “DAY 3” and “DAY 4”). Blake composes her meditative thread across a meandering of compressed time and the advent of spring, writing rebirth, renewal and death; she drifts across allegory and the specifics of foliage, wild animals and even a horse. As part “31” offers: “She likes this. She likes you. She has no idea what she wants.”

Offering a poem that sits simultaneously within the body and the body of nature, Blake writes the bounds of a season, following the details of movement and temporal space. “Who’s to say how far away the branches are?” she writes, as part of the poem “16.” in “DAY 2,” “Who’s to say how far / away the sky is? Who spends their time measuring distances? // Is that an act of touching?” In Spring Time offers of and from spring, sketching moments through what appear as a kind of lyrical and physical dream-state of horses, streams and daily meditations, attempting to find her footing. As “20.” includes: “You’re glad the sun is going to spend time every day shining on you. / This version of you that will outlast your body.”

 

JoAnna Novak, Abeyance, North America

So            loneliness is not emptiness,

            not an ambushed field,

            not Cistercian,

            not cloistered

but           concupiscent

    so fragile, full,

            and open to you remembering,

            silverizing

                    oxygen, kissing

                    a little trowel

                            I keep

                        down my dress.

Yes          I do want rauwolfia,

            jasmine, California poppies,

    forget-me-nots, I desire the

                    raw green peppercorns

                        in your noisy toolbox. (“LOS ANGELES → CONTINENT”)

Writer, editor and publisher (founder of the chapbook publisher and online journal Tammy) JoAnna Novak’s second poetry title, after Noirmania (Inside the Castle, 2018), and third published book, is Abeyance, North America (New York/Kingston NY: After Hours Editions, 2020). Abeyance, North America is constructed as a suite of five lyric suites: “LOS ANGELES → CONTINENT,” “BOSTON → BOSTON,” “INTERLUDE: PARADISIAQUE,” “NORTH PACIFIC DRIFT → HOTEL SUITE” and “ABEYANCE → LOFT X.” Novak’s poems are ripe with a confident and sexy swagger, and there is a meditative insistence here that is quite compelling, accumulated through her short-sketched lyrics, one set on top of another. “You are the one I want / and we will examine it / every day. Horrible / carpeting of illegal white / trillium and those cats / and prostitutes for / I was game at Thunder / Bay amethysts and kissing / your cock beautiful.” Her poems articulate movement, awareness, beauty and consequence, each suite-section shifting from one state to another, even if there might be little to do obvious difference between those two states. “Suppose the Virgin River left Zion and replaced / the Harbor.” she writes, to open the prose-sequence “BOSTON → BOSTON”: “Put the edge of my plan in a gorge.”

There is a 2018 interview online with Novak, conducted by Sarah Blake for Chicago Review of Books that I found quite interesting. The interview focused, in part, on some of Novak’s work with formal structure—the Spencerian sonnet, line breaks and Oulipian structures—specifically within her then-newly-published poetry debut, Noirmania. The interview reinforces what Abeyance, North America already provides: the awareness that Novak’s structural considerations are purposeful, as well as highly playful, through a small collection composed across an ambitious space and conceptually-large canvas. How does her abeyance, her suspension, spread itself across an entire continent? As Novak responds as part of that 2018 interview:

I agree that line breaks and enjambment create magic, for sure, and I love when you can be tugged between multiples readings of a line. I write prose, too, and so a lot of the time, when I’m typing a poem, I’m eager to think about the gaps and leaps and aporias I can create by tabbing or spacing. I like the gulps and caesuras a poem splattered with white space can have. And then, too, I think working with the whole page can be an extremely useful editing tool. I’m bolder in what I excise when I write with a lot of white space. Sometimes I’ll work a draft of a poem that way and then bring it back to a more controlled form—I like when language retains that distilled feeling. 

Sarah Blake, Let’s Not Live on Earth

THE SAFETY OF WOMEN

Women are not often killed in the street.

They are most often killed in the home.

At every doctor’s appointment, I’m asked,

Do you feel safe at home? The women

who should answer, No, most likely ends up

dead—shot, if we’re going to be specific.

And I want to be specific, when every vague

word seems to hurt me, when it’s thought

the surface speaks to everything needed

to be said because the woman works

on her surface alone. Look at my dancing

on my own skin. Even the shell of me

resembles nothing you could touch me to

with words. Reach out elsewhere, your hand.

Philadelphia poet Sarah Blake’s poetry collection Let’s Not Live on Earth (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), a follow-up to her striking debut, Mr. West (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], takes a bit of a darker turn. Composing a series of lyrics more overtly personal than in her first collection, Blake’s poems attempt to negotiate physical, personal and cultural space, referencing depression, marriage and gun culture, and the knowledge of having to eventually explain certain things, including suicide, to her son, such as in the opening poem, “SUICIDE PREVENTION,” which immediately sets the tone of the collection: “My son bends down to hug a family / of very small ghosts. // I don’t know how to talk to him about death. // When I told him about his great grandfather, / who he’s named after, and that conversation / led right where you think—He’s dead— / he told me, Only bad guys die, and I / could only argue that so many times.” In the book’s first section, composed of shorter lyric narrative poems, Blake writes of monsters, violence, motherhood, and writing about what parents fear most: death, whether theirs or yours. “I’m dead and you’re still alive / and I come back. // I come back // to see you. I come back / to tell you something?” (“A POEM FOR MY SON”).

MY OBSESSION WITH JUST IS

MY OBSESSION WITH THE TEMPORAL

Just ok / Just like that / Just like it / Just worry / Just there / Just so / Just as / Just because / Just observed / Just disparate / Just a part / Just trying / Just the paper / Just more / Just get / Just because / Just like / Just the flowers then / Or just / Just get / Just haven’t / Just come back / Just in case / It was just that / It’s just / Just once / I just want / Just after / Just an obituary / And just / Just more / You’re just / Just not

The second half of the collection is made up of a single, lengthy sequence, “THE STARSHIP,” a “science-fiction epic poem” that explores what might happen when domesticity breaks down, and aliens subsequently arrive and invite you to leave, constructed out of one hundred and two short stanza-scenes, including:

First you notice how small the beds are.

You’ve been sharing a bed with a man

for years. This will be the biggest challenge

for you, but you get it. It’s as if the aliens

are saying, We’re happy to have you

but this isn’t a good time to get pregnant.

And you wonder about the medicine

on board. You wonder if doctors volunteered

to come on the ship. You wonder

if you’re of any use at all.

Blake’s Let’s Not Live on Earth is a book of anxiety, writing out the complexities and stresses of being alive in her particular place in her particular time, from marriage and children as well as the larger cultural issues that impact all of the above. If the first section specifically explores her anxieties, what becomes curious is in how the second section explores leaving everything behind, which slowly makes clear how many of those same issues, and same anxieties, remain. Let’s Not Live on Earth is a striking and complex book, one that provides no easy answers, but exploring, instead, the navigation of certain difficulties, especially those that might be impossible to remove.