Darkest Where the Light Begins: On Road Scatter by Sandra Meek
Christopher Kondrich
Road Scatter, Sandra Meek’s devastating new book of poetry, aches with a sense of loss not only for her mother to whom the collection is dedicated, but also historically, globally. It illuminates the fragility of our constructions—lives, buildings, societies—and their vulnerability to illness, folly and the ravages of the natural world. Loss is portrayed as the common denominator among bodies, languages and worlds, and the breakage of one overlaps with the breakage of another. The poems in Road Scatter expose this co-mingling as a way of finding presence even in the most painful absence.
“Shadow Portrait” begins the collection in darkness, scans the landscape’s liminal space to find “the last commas of her hair,” her mother’s hair scattered in language. She finds, “cursive stringing / letter to letter in quartertone slide.” In an allusion to the elegiac tradition, these images initiate the poet’s work not as a refashioning of the lost body of the beloved into, say, a wreath or flute, but as the work of locating the body-as-language already embedded in the world. The commas, letters, and cursive stringing are pieces of the language shared by the human and nonhuman realms, and discovered with eyes peering through the lens of grief. And while these fragments of language do not provide meaning, they indicate a path toward acceptance of what is, a path that begins and ends in poetry. “I trace her to— / there, where the light ends.” In this, the final couplet of “Shadow Portrait,” there is the border between light and dark, grief and acceptance. It is where two worlds meet—daughter and mother, personal and universal, local and global—and fuse into one.
From there, Meek’s poems zoom out towards origin, from where the particular can be traced back to the historical, the collective. In “Columba Livia,” Meet writes:
Then
the farms moved inland until the frontier was desert
skewered with outsized windmills, spinning tridents
scissoring errant wings. Back home, what might be called country,
we call them doves: rock
to distinguish from mourning.
The mind reels back to consider how country derived from frontier, how knowledge of fauna defined a childhood. The “I” of the poem is swept back in time to “we.” Even the title wrings an intimate memory from Latin classification, from an inherent order.
In “The History of Air, Part I,” Meek continues this casting of her gaze backward:
Once there was a once, a story
she added each night to
until the calendar slipped
from the wall, her blood running
away from my hand’s small pressure
Once, similar to the Latin classification of the previous poem’s title, is a gesture toward the shared—something of a historical commonality—out of which stems her particular grief. Indeed, once there was innocence, but the once-ness of life is over; what remains is the body breaking down, the brittleness of all bodies and of language. Two stanzas down, when once reappears, it signals not innocence, but a present absence:
the doorknob she could turn,
once, when constellations glittered
until she clicked them
off behind blinds underscoring
the night she no longer
This “once” is loosed by grief from its prior connotations, from its storytelling context. And yet, it harkens back to the first stanza indicating a breakage of language as the poem occurs. It is a powerful moment that reveals breakage as a transformation not only of the body, but also of language. Indeed, what is wrested from grief—the poem—is vulnerable to the same transformation as grief itself.
Additionally, as structures crumble and humanity declines in poems like “New Construction” and “Urban Warfare as Design,” we see the various ways illness manifests. We see how “the scaffold of bone / breaks down, as a toothpick-thin ship threads // away from its bottle’s blown glass.” In the eyes of grief, the human body breaking down is everywhere. We read through Meek’s eyes the fragility of the things we make. In this case, it is a tangible thing, a building, but in “The History of Air, Part I” and almost everywhere in Road Scatter, it is the life we make that is fragile.
Similarly, in “Urban Warfare as Design,” a heart and a gun are elided through the image of their chambers—both indicating weakness:
Even cornered, the torn body zeroes on healing
its own jagged edges, even as the bullet tumbles
from chamber to barrel, repeating the pattern again,
again.
In this poem, the body that breaks isn’t just the victim, but the body politic, how we treat one another across societies. This, too, is ill, and the way in which Meek portrays violence—the poem “Marble Figure, Descending Panorama” also comes to mind—indicates a grief that spreads out from personal to global loss. In the gripping “In Case, Since You Left, You’ve Been Wondering,” Meek writes, “the body is a slackening slab of terror // and loneliness, and why.” And while the “why” continues with “isn’t there a mother machine to never run out,” its line-break indicates a disquiet, a generalized frustration spurred by the violence of people that crops up intermittently throughout the collection.
All of these explorations of breakage evoked in Road Scatter—be it structural, natural or of the body politic—render the moments interior to the book’s primary sense of loss all the more devastating. “Air Hunger” begins:
What you hear, barely, the body’s
last music: sword
of snow melt, stalactites’
mineral drip. Struggle is what no longer
translates: her sleeping
mouth open, the way a snake
unhinges--
Devastation comes from how closely Meek allows her poems, her readers to get to “the body’s / last music.” The s sounds in this passage stand in for her mother’s lack of speech; they coil around the poem and do not relent, for relenting the music of the poem, the music of the body, would mean the loss of what sustains: language. Indeed, these s sounds wrest a moment of poetic intimacy out of a moment of experiential intimacy. They represent how the poetic can be wrested from the experiential bearing the mark of their wresting in their very fabric.
The persistent image of light, too, functions similarly as the many s sounds in “Air Hunger” as a remnant of the act of wresting the poetic out of the experiential. The repetition, the constant glancing up towards light in its various incarnations evokes the desire for acceptance and grace, and the poems—“Marble Figure, Descending Panorama,” “On Vengeance,” “Moth Season,” “Live Performance,” “Fifteen to Twenty,” “Last Rites”—perform this glancing up throughout the collection. And although the “petrified light” of “On Vengeance” may seem like a different light than the “one bare lit bulb” of “Moth Season,” in the world of Road Scatter, which is our world, these lights are one-in-the-same. Indeed, the moon is the same moon from wherever it is viewed.
The image of light unites the collection just as much as loss unites the realms of body, language and world. Road Scatter crosses these realms with agility and insight, and ends with “the water rising / darkest where the light begins.” It is an image similar to the image of the shadow in “Shadow Portrait” where the collection began, an image that portrays breakage not as irrevocable loss, but of transformation. Perhaps this revision of breakage is Road Scatter’s most fulfilling accomplishment. Grief may make us see transformation as breakage, but it is the work of the poem, the work of this startling collection, to allow us to see breakage as the transformation it truly is.
Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal (Parlor Press, 2013). New poems also appear or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Guernica, Jerry, The Paris-American and Washington Square. A recent winner of The Paris-American Reading Series Contest, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Denver and an editor for Denver Quarterly.
Christopher Kondrich
Road Scatter, Sandra Meek’s devastating new book of poetry, aches with a sense of loss not only for her mother to whom the collection is dedicated, but also historically, globally. It illuminates the fragility of our constructions—lives, buildings, societies—and their vulnerability to illness, folly and the ravages of the natural world. Loss is portrayed as the common denominator among bodies, languages and worlds, and the breakage of one overlaps with the breakage of another. The poems in Road Scatter expose this co-mingling as a way of finding presence even in the most painful absence.
“Shadow Portrait” begins the collection in darkness, scans the landscape’s liminal space to find “the last commas of her hair,” her mother’s hair scattered in language. She finds, “cursive stringing / letter to letter in quartertone slide.” In an allusion to the elegiac tradition, these images initiate the poet’s work not as a refashioning of the lost body of the beloved into, say, a wreath or flute, but as the work of locating the body-as-language already embedded in the world. The commas, letters, and cursive stringing are pieces of the language shared by the human and nonhuman realms, and discovered with eyes peering through the lens of grief. And while these fragments of language do not provide meaning, they indicate a path toward acceptance of what is, a path that begins and ends in poetry. “I trace her to— / there, where the light ends.” In this, the final couplet of “Shadow Portrait,” there is the border between light and dark, grief and acceptance. It is where two worlds meet—daughter and mother, personal and universal, local and global—and fuse into one.
From there, Meek’s poems zoom out towards origin, from where the particular can be traced back to the historical, the collective. In “Columba Livia,” Meet writes:
Then
the farms moved inland until the frontier was desert
skewered with outsized windmills, spinning tridents
scissoring errant wings. Back home, what might be called country,
we call them doves: rock
to distinguish from mourning.
The mind reels back to consider how country derived from frontier, how knowledge of fauna defined a childhood. The “I” of the poem is swept back in time to “we.” Even the title wrings an intimate memory from Latin classification, from an inherent order.
In “The History of Air, Part I,” Meek continues this casting of her gaze backward:
Once there was a once, a story
she added each night to
until the calendar slipped
from the wall, her blood running
away from my hand’s small pressure
Once, similar to the Latin classification of the previous poem’s title, is a gesture toward the shared—something of a historical commonality—out of which stems her particular grief. Indeed, once there was innocence, but the once-ness of life is over; what remains is the body breaking down, the brittleness of all bodies and of language. Two stanzas down, when once reappears, it signals not innocence, but a present absence:
the doorknob she could turn,
once, when constellations glittered
until she clicked them
off behind blinds underscoring
the night she no longer
This “once” is loosed by grief from its prior connotations, from its storytelling context. And yet, it harkens back to the first stanza indicating a breakage of language as the poem occurs. It is a powerful moment that reveals breakage as a transformation not only of the body, but also of language. Indeed, what is wrested from grief—the poem—is vulnerable to the same transformation as grief itself.
Additionally, as structures crumble and humanity declines in poems like “New Construction” and “Urban Warfare as Design,” we see the various ways illness manifests. We see how “the scaffold of bone / breaks down, as a toothpick-thin ship threads // away from its bottle’s blown glass.” In the eyes of grief, the human body breaking down is everywhere. We read through Meek’s eyes the fragility of the things we make. In this case, it is a tangible thing, a building, but in “The History of Air, Part I” and almost everywhere in Road Scatter, it is the life we make that is fragile.
Similarly, in “Urban Warfare as Design,” a heart and a gun are elided through the image of their chambers—both indicating weakness:
Even cornered, the torn body zeroes on healing
its own jagged edges, even as the bullet tumbles
from chamber to barrel, repeating the pattern again,
again.
In this poem, the body that breaks isn’t just the victim, but the body politic, how we treat one another across societies. This, too, is ill, and the way in which Meek portrays violence—the poem “Marble Figure, Descending Panorama” also comes to mind—indicates a grief that spreads out from personal to global loss. In the gripping “In Case, Since You Left, You’ve Been Wondering,” Meek writes, “the body is a slackening slab of terror // and loneliness, and why.” And while the “why” continues with “isn’t there a mother machine to never run out,” its line-break indicates a disquiet, a generalized frustration spurred by the violence of people that crops up intermittently throughout the collection.
All of these explorations of breakage evoked in Road Scatter—be it structural, natural or of the body politic—render the moments interior to the book’s primary sense of loss all the more devastating. “Air Hunger” begins:
What you hear, barely, the body’s
last music: sword
of snow melt, stalactites’
mineral drip. Struggle is what no longer
translates: her sleeping
mouth open, the way a snake
unhinges--
Devastation comes from how closely Meek allows her poems, her readers to get to “the body’s / last music.” The s sounds in this passage stand in for her mother’s lack of speech; they coil around the poem and do not relent, for relenting the music of the poem, the music of the body, would mean the loss of what sustains: language. Indeed, these s sounds wrest a moment of poetic intimacy out of a moment of experiential intimacy. They represent how the poetic can be wrested from the experiential bearing the mark of their wresting in their very fabric.
The persistent image of light, too, functions similarly as the many s sounds in “Air Hunger” as a remnant of the act of wresting the poetic out of the experiential. The repetition, the constant glancing up towards light in its various incarnations evokes the desire for acceptance and grace, and the poems—“Marble Figure, Descending Panorama,” “On Vengeance,” “Moth Season,” “Live Performance,” “Fifteen to Twenty,” “Last Rites”—perform this glancing up throughout the collection. And although the “petrified light” of “On Vengeance” may seem like a different light than the “one bare lit bulb” of “Moth Season,” in the world of Road Scatter, which is our world, these lights are one-in-the-same. Indeed, the moon is the same moon from wherever it is viewed.
The image of light unites the collection just as much as loss unites the realms of body, language and world. Road Scatter crosses these realms with agility and insight, and ends with “the water rising / darkest where the light begins.” It is an image similar to the image of the shadow in “Shadow Portrait” where the collection began, an image that portrays breakage not as irrevocable loss, but of transformation. Perhaps this revision of breakage is Road Scatter’s most fulfilling accomplishment. Grief may make us see transformation as breakage, but it is the work of the poem, the work of this startling collection, to allow us to see breakage as the transformation it truly is.
Christopher Kondrich is the author of Contrapuntal (Parlor Press, 2013). New poems also appear or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Guernica, Jerry, The Paris-American and Washington Square. A recent winner of The Paris-American Reading Series Contest, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Denver and an editor for Denver Quarterly.