On Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson’s Rendered Paradise

My review of Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson's collaborative Rendered Paradise (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2024) is now online at Seneca Review.

Elizabeth Robinson, Thirst & Surfeit

 

Mary Reade

While I was captive,
I saw that horizon rhymes with reason.

And like so, the shape of the roof
beckons the hull of a boat.

It’s the sun who decides, in the end,
whether the sea is a plateau or a well and how
such will clang on the atmosphere.

I was captive until I fell off the edge where the great heat
made me captain

of its lull and its whitecap.

I am mistress, now, of similarities.
My reason is to take and take now
as the horizon takes from me

or toward:

the bowed edge of a vessel never
secure or heal. The untoward advance

of light arrests

this surface as given.

Zig-zagging freedom to illumine
what I’ve wrested.

Reason rejects the curve.

The latest from American poet and editor Elizabeth Robinson is the collection Thirst & Surfeit (High Point NC: Threadsuns, 2023), a collection that follows a sequence of historical threads, offering themes-as-section titles, seven in all: “The Bog Traverse 1200-600 B.C.E.,” “Hovenweep 1200-1300 C.E.,” “Anne Hutchinson 1591-1643,” “Two Pirates 1690-1782,” “Ferdinand Gregorovius 1821-1891,” “The Canudos Rebellion, Brazil 1893-1897” and “2023,” a section that holds but the single poem “Legion.” There’s an incredible precision to these pieces, an extended stretch of poems on exploration and response across the veil of what might appear to be a scattered list of historical moments and eras. What holds these different time-periods together? “What we’ve shared in common / has made us sink.” she writes, to open the poem “Disappearance,” set as part of the penultimate section. “The earth floor, / swept clean so many times / clings to speech. Ubiquitous // sunlight / shows us these particles // as we dwindle beneath them.” Again, what ties these periods together? “History,” as the cover flap of the collection offers, “like ‘light untied and undone,’ disperses itself across time and memory. The poems in Thirst & Surfeit reach into these fragments to interpret and sing interactions of human and environment, spirit and subsistence.” One might suggest that the connecting tissue between time-periods and their resulting lyrics are simply Robinson’s approach and attentions, striking lyrics on how so much remains unchanged between such temporal lengths, such as the weight of a moment, or how uncertainty and accountability are as much explored as the details of each particular era, as the opening poem of the second section reads:

You are not now what you were meant to be. And this is why mirages are without irony.

So hurry: the precipate falls hard onto forgetful dirt. The external, like rain, jars you.

There are stretches of miles, of the unexpected; they menace and recant. You prefer that the haste drop you off like a passenger, into tedium. You are in brambles that annoy but do not scratch.

 

A cartoonish body waits outside yours, whistling and smirking.

The precipitous

falls sodden-to-itself, to shoulders like yours, piggyback.
Hard. Finally, hurtful: this patience.
The trees named for Joshua pick up their arms, plainly out of obedience.

There is an interesting structural shift in this collection, beyond what she’s worked in some of her more recent collections, composing a handful of collections via short lyric response poems, each titled on the variation of “On _____,” from her Excursive (New York NY: Roof Books, 2023) [see my review of such here] and On Ghosts (Solid Objects, 2013) [see my review of such here]. The poems of Thirst & Surfeit offer a blend of structures, from the fragmented long-poem effect of the second section, the self-contained compactness of the prose poems that make up the book’s opening section, to the dual pirate poems that deliberately work to play off each other. The effect is curious, akin to an anthology of sorts, as though the form through which she responds is as important a shift as her temporal zones and subject matter. “We measure vastness by the limit of our mortal life.” She writes, to open the poem “Salvation,” set as part of the “Anne Hutchinson” section. “I would have you look, as example, at the face of the clock. It is a face, // even as it cherishes its own absent mouth and closed eyes. Its example we // should emulate.” It is almost as though she is attempting to capture something larger, and ongoing, with each collection that preceded this one all part of what went into this singular and multitudinous work, a heft of lyric across eighty pages.

 

Elizabeth Robinson, Excursive

 

On January 1
                                    for Norma Cole

Time is light,

that’s all. Her tongue

a version, a map

version, where star maps

are always off-history whether

translating light

from a far galaxy or a local

starlet. “Oh!”

she said, a figure of herself,

“Yes.” Whereupon the light

threw itself down and pierced

her tongue, where it remained

like a stud, that she licked against

her teeth as she spoke.

The latest from Bay Area poet and editor Elizabeth Robinson [see the recent festschrift I produced on her work here] is Excursive (New York NY: Roof Books, 2023). Excursive follows an array of Robinson’s chapbooks and full-length collections, including blue heron (Center for Literary Publishing, 2013) [see my review of such here], On Ghosts (Solid Objects, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Rumor (Free Verse Editions, Parlor Press, 2018) [see my review of such here]. Subtitled “Essays [Partial & Incomplete],” with addendum “(on Abstraction, Entity, Experience, Impression, Oddity, Utterance, &c.),” the seventy-seven poems in Excursion include titles such as “On Beauty,” “On Depression,” “On Epiphanies,” “On Happiness” and “On Mortality.” Robinson has been playing the form of “On _____” for a while now, threading through multiple of her published full-length collections, allowing the structure as a kind of linked “catch-all” across her poetic. The “On ____” is reminiscent of Anne Carson’s infamous collection Short Talks (London ON: Brick Books, 1992), with each Carson prose poem in the collection titled “Short talk on _____,” but the ongoingness across multiple collections that Robinson employs is comparable to Ontario poet Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days” sequence, one that has extended through the entire length and breadth of his own publishing history across more than three decades. “While the body,” Robinson writes, as part of the extended “On [a theory of] Resolution,” “why, it // remains aligned to its // thirst. You know this. // You deny this. The theory // of resolution is meteorological / and not eternal.”

The poems are also set alphabetically by titled subject, throwing off the collection’s easy narrative or thematic sequence, allowing the collage of her lyric to hold the collection together, akin to a fine tapestry. Throughout, she utilizes her declared subject-title as a kind of jumping-off point into far-flung possibilities: choosing at times the specificity of her declared subject, but refusing to be held or limited by it. “To her who assumes / this identity,” she writes, to close the poem “On Numbness,” “a citizen // befuddled by destination, / it’s not possible / to have arrived here from anywhere, // not possible to assimilate to new fluency.” In many ways, this is a book about the body and how the body reacts, moving from physical to physiological reaction, action and purpose, allowing the echoes of references and sentences to form a coherence that a more straightforward narrative might never allow. “I was a lung,” she writes, to end the poem “On Extinctions,” “a hardening lobe, while // the moving air curved as though an ivory horn // and lay still.” She writes out the body, using her titles as markers, and at times, anchors, providing a weight that occasionally prevents her lyrics from floating away entirely. At times, it seems she works from specifics into a rippling beyond the limitations of how each poem begins, as though the title is the pebble dropped into the pond, and the poem is the rippling effect on the water. She writes the body, and even the betrayal of the body, one that echoes across a prior period of illness, perhaps; and there is almost something of being only able to write of something directly by coming at it from the side. “Time was a tumor in its very own landmass.” she writes, to  begin the poem “On Krakatoa,” “It couldn’t have been more intrepid.”

Karen Donovan, Monad + Monadnock

 

MEGAPLEX

I was becoming impatient.
My report was due and we were still on the first floor.

The next wallah played a repeating game:
“I’ve Got Bits of Fig in My Teeth.”

Say, wasn’t that an early piece
by Yoko Ono?

“Amplitude into blue sky” was the dessert.
People were throwing pennies into the potted palms.

It’s a wishing witch, you said, hoping to delight me.
The light was implacable.

Berkeley poet Elizabeth Robinson recently recommended Rhode Island poet and editor Karen Donovan’s latest poetry title, Monad + Monadnock (Berkeley CA: Wet Cement Press, 2022), as I’d heard of neither author nor press before. The author of a handful of titles of poetry and short prose, Donovan’s gracefully-small collection of eighty pages is made up of sharp lyrics and deep cuts, direct lines and a stunning wit, moreso for its quickness and its subtlety. Hers is a lyric of leaps and odd precisions, takes that can turn on a dime, and questions so large that the lyric itself might burst but for the scope of her craft. “I wondered,” she writes, to open the poem “ALEPH NAUGHT,” “are we addressing a collection of / the so-called infinite? A bag with the world in it // plus anything is still the same bag. Half a bag / with the world in it is equal to the whole bag.” There’s something quite delightful the way her lines blur into each other, somehow simultaneously tethered and untethered from each other, offering a narrative of what could be seen as both imaginary breaks and a deceptive linkeage. Do these poems hold hints of surrealism or the foundations of reality, seemingly impossible but completely real? She writes of questions and clarifications, the biggest questions and impossible answers, offering specifics where once had been fog. Through Donovan, even the abstract has form, and what forms they are. As she writes to end the poem “NOW THAT THE WORLD IS / NO LONGER STRANGE”: “The flowers are real, the vipers are real. / Creation is singing.”