In his foreword to Jill Osier’s The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, Carl Phillips notes how slippery such set notions as “fact” and “knowledge” become in Osier’s poetry. He writes that “knowing itself can get confounded: as Randall Jarrell now almost long ago put it, ‘Which one’s the mockingbird? which one’s the world?’”
“[A]s Randall Jarrell now almost long ago put it,” writes Phillips and — almost by an accident of syntax — he provides us with an avenue into Osier’s debut collection. As important as these questions of knowing might be, this other idea — that of “now almost long ago,” of a temporal distance suspended between memory and myth — summarizes succinctly much of the poetic force of The Solace Is Not the Lullaby.
“The years have continued / to drop, like a steady rain, / their tiny stones,” writes Osier in a poem entitled “Guadalquivir.” This notion of accumulation — that the years pile up slowly, delicately — marks many of her best poems. As in “November Elegy,” a poem that reads, in its entirety:
Who were they, those women
watching the sky
lose heat, while I
with the dark
played, fell to the yard
again and again, the cold then
merely a smell on me.
This short lyric finds Osier at her most precise. As she interrogates this slight memory — which exists in that “now almost long ago” that keeps details but cedes particular contours — her subtle rhymes tie the lines together like twine: the end-rhymed “sky / I” gives way to a buried “again / then” rhyme — which yields, in turn, to the slight echo of that final phrase, “smell on me,” with the sound of “elegy” in the poem’s title.
And yet, for all its backward glances down the past’s dark corridor, The Solace Is Not the Lullaby refuses nostalgia. In “The Horses are Fighting,” Osier keeps her guard up until the very last moment:
They stand scattered and not
facing each other. Like black-eyed
susans lining the highway, or sisters
angry in some small kitchen.
The goats, they traipse a diagonal
through knee-high meadow,
following head to tail. Then
one decides to feed. Suddenly
they are strangers.
But how elegant animals seem
these weeks after your funeral, each
quiet despite a whole field, content
with any fresh mouthful.
Whether this present — “these weeks” — are from the speaker’s memory of her small-town childhood or whether they take place “thousands of miles away” in her adult life becomes, ultimately, irrelevant in the face of this all-too-real “funeral” — the sudden disclosure of which both shocks and, retroactively, seems forecasted from the opening lines.
Much of the collection proceeds in this mode: slight, precise images shuttle in — as if under the cover of night — disparate memories, which, in turn, paint a steadily-sharpening portrait of a childhood, a town, a life. Characters come and go — an unnamed friend, a mother, an adopted brother — but the tone persists in that restrained blend of melancholy and exactitude that Phillips names, rightly, a form of “modesty.”
But this “modesty” of tone and scope frees Osier to take rhetorical leaps that — were her images not grounded so firmly in the unadorned, physical world — might fail otherwise.
As it stands, though, these lyric risks light up her poems as the streaks of light (fireflies in a tree? stars reflected in a river?) do her book’s dark cover: “We are never loving what we think we are. Never / simply,” she declares boldly.
Just a few poems later, she states — as if it were the most obvious observation in the world: “Only things / like ice and snow come back.” And who’s to say she’s wrong?
*
These questions of “now almost long ago” — of standing far enough from the past to examine it but close enough, still, to smell it and be smelled by it — mark almost every page of Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, the poet’s fourth book.
“You’re on a train & your ancestors are in the Quiet Car,” reads the book’s opening line — thus embodying this relation between the “now,” the “almost,” and the “long ago.” But the speaker’s relationship to these “ancestors” becomes fraught quickly:
You’re a professional password decrypter, but your ancestors are
demolition experts.
You’re wearing black tactical gear & your ancestors are wearing
black tactical gear.
Before we’ve had time to even grow accustomed to the feeling of the book in our hands, Petrosino launches us into the middle of a relationship with a past that — whatever else it is — will not stay behind her.
Nor will she allow it to. Throughout White Blood, Petrosino evinces her nearly-boundless poetic skill at every turn of the page in order to interrogate these “demolition expert” ancestors: erasures of a National Geographic DNA test speak in a global voice; a crown of sonnets both explores her time as a student at the University of Virginia and serves as an elegy for her grandfather; a series of villanelles gives voice to the “documentary silences” of two of her Virginian ancestors.
This wide array of formal experimentation could—depending on the poet—grow unpleasantly dizzying. And yet, because of Petrosino’s skill and the magnitude of her subject matter — much of the book explores the lasting stain of Thomas Jefferson’s racism — the different poetic experiments seem, each, in their turn, necessary. One feels, reading White Blood, that Petrosino is throwing everything she has at this looming question of how to live — how to survive, even — while Black in America.
This means, more often than not, a direct confrontation with the past — as in “Instructions for Time Travel,” one of the book’s most chilling lyrics:
You must go through Mr. Jefferson
along his row of chinaberry trees
behind the ruined smokehouse
in unmarked tracts, under fieldstones
with no carvings, no monuments
with a few leaves shadowing the mulch
near scattered weeds, in sunken lines
while the sun walks in the day
at the end of the day
in an oval of brushed earth
just as the soft path finishes
under branches
where the dead are always saying
what they always say:
Write about me.
These final lines position Petrosino’s speaker in an almost-Dantean position — with the shades of the damned and the saved and the not-yet-saved alike “always saying / what they always say: // Write about me.”
And Petrosino complies — despite moments in which her ancestors renege on their request. “Little child, we’re at rest / in the acres we purchased,” these ancestors sing in “Message from the Free Smiths of Louisa County,” the first of four villanelles that allow Harriett and Butler Smith — two of Petrosino’s ancestors — to speak back to their descendant’s constant questioning. They go on: “Only a few of our names survive. / We left you this: sudden glints in the grass.” But rather than rest in these gorgeous lines, Petrosino (urged on by the villanelle’s formal requirements) goes on. The poem ends:
The rest is grown folks’ business we say. Yet
you keep asking who owned us.
The tension between these final lines and those that precede them encapsulates much of the tension in White Blood as a whole. Petrosino seeks to honor these “sudden glints in the grass” —she longs to explore the personality and character of those whom American history has erased — and yet she refuses to let her guard down for even a second. She never stops demanding the brutal truth.
*
Whereas Petrosino writes into a past whose violence threatens to overtake the present at every line break — and whereas Osier examines her own memories with a trained eye — Alice Oswald’s new collection, Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea, looks back even farther.
Like an archaeologist sifting through an abandoned dig, Oswald peers into the depths of Homer’s The Odyssey and extracts from it a single, passed-over detail — and, as she did in 2011’s Memorial, she builds from this fragment an entire, book-length poem.
This detail—this foundation on which the entire poem rests — Oswald explains in a short preface:
When Agamemnon went to Troy, he paid a poet to spy on his wife, but another man rowed the poet to a stony island and seduced her. Ten years later, Agamemnon came home and was murdered.
Odysseus, setting out at the same time, was blown off course. It took him another ten years to get home, but his wife, unlike Agamemnon’s, had stayed faithful.
This poem lives in the murkiness between those stories. Its voice is wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never discovered the poem’s ending.
Because of Oswald’s allusive (and elusive) style — which spurns proper names and punctuation alike — this “Hymn to the Sea” benefits immensely from such clear framing. “These stories flutter about / as fast as torchlight” a disembodied voice declares early on, as if bracing us for the whirlwind that will follow.
And though what follows is, it’s true, something of a whirlwind — we catch glimpses of Icarus and Alcyone, hear disembodied fragments of speech from Clytemnestra and Proteus — Nobody is neither a puzzle to be solved nor a riddle to be answered. Rather, it’s a world to inhabit, a sea in which to swim.
Twice Oswald nods to the difficulty of the task before her, isolating on a single page the following impossible question:
How does it start the sea has endless beginnings
Unlike a river — the source of which provides, at least ostensibly, a figural teleology (and, in 2002’s Dart, did just that for Oswald herself) — the sea offers no guidance; it has no “start” and therefore, paradoxically, “has endless beginnings.”
But Oswald finds freedom in this almost-rhizomatic play: “Image after image it never ends / it has the texture of plough but with no harvest.”
Despite the accuracy of these lines to describe both the sea and the “texture” of Nobody, we might ask, still, what kind of a “harvest” Oswald has offered us. That is, after all of the allusion and misdirection and self-reference, what exactly is this poem?
By way of an answer, here’s one of the most striking passages in Nobody:
There is a harbour where an old sea-god sometimes surfaces
two cliffs keep out the wind you need no anchor
the water in fascinated horror holds your boat
at the far end a thin-leaved olive casts a kind of evening over a cave
which is water’s house where it leads its double life
there are four stone bowls and four stone jars
and the bees of their own accord leave honey there
salt-shapes hang from the roof like giant looms
where the tide weaves leathery sea-nets
be amazed by that colour it is the mind’s inmost madness
but the sea itself has no character just this horrible thirst
goes on creeping over the stones and shrinking away
These lines offer a glimpse at what makes reading Nobody such a captivating experience. Though grounded in the particularities of Menelaus’ story to Telemachus (as well as, however glancingly, Virgil’s fourth Georgic), this passage establishes its own slippery footing, its own “wind-blown” voice.
While the images strike us first — the “thin-leaved olive casts a kind of evening”; the “salt-shapes… like giant looms”; “the tide weaves leathery sea-nets” — the final lines address the reader directly. “Be amazed by that colour,” we are told. And so — as if we could do otherwise — we comply.
[The Solace Is Not the Lullaby by Jill Osier, published by Yale University Press on March 17, 2020, 80 pages, $20.00 paperback … White Blood by Kiki Petrosino, published by Sarabande Books on May 5, 2020, 112 pages, $15.95 paperback … Nobody by Alice Oswald, published by W.W. Norton on July 21, 2020, 88 pages, $25.00 hardcover]