Burn by Sandra Meek (2005)
Sandra Meek’s second full-length collection of poems combines a remarkable intensity of image and description with a heightened attention to craft as well as outside textual material. Meek is not after the tight and compact focus of the short lyric but, rather, a rambling and discursive type of philosophically driven meditation. In “Flood Coverage,” the uses of image and simile transcend mere description; instead, they become the focus of the poem as it unfurls. Each image ushers the reader onto the poem’s next ornate, delicate terrace. Every line builds upon the last, and gestures toward the next:
Some nights the soul gets trapped
in the skull, a kernel’s undetonated genes ticking the complete
unwritten narrative. Some gifted in rare flashes can hear
the precise shade between indigo and midnight
blue. Mostly, we spend our lives toneblind,
recorded mid tape like candles spun midwick, each end unlit so
safely referred to as eternal.
One gets the eerie feeling from these tightly tuned and heavily enjambed lines that each is essential to the whole of the poem. “Flood Coverage” is but one poem in an entire collection that operates in such fashion. In many of these poems, the best line is every line.
Meek’s willingness to include every detail of her vision is the driving force behind the poems as they flower relentlessly through the first sections of the book. In the poem “Wreck,” the intensity of description struggles palpably against the enjambment and the continuous refusal of the poem to ground itself in any particular narrative context. Instead, Meek makes description and metaphor themselves her framework:
If a shell spirals an ocean, its alpine absence
hums a glacial cool beyond atmosphere, what the earthbound
imagine of space, silence of ice and pale,
dwarfed flowers. The mountain goats’ drift dissolves
the spine of bleached boulders scattered
above timberline—a glacier’s remnant
skates the road…
Here the images emerge at the beginning of each line, the rich adjectives and thickly woven sounds evoking a breathlessness, as though the poet is simply unable to cease the flow of description. For each concrete image (the mountain goats, the glacier), an accompanying action or description arrives out of pure imagination.
Ironically, after fifty pages of nonstop stylistic exclamation, the center piece of the book, a fourteen-page poem entitled “A Short History of Flight,” combines all of the elements that appear before it with extensive raids on outside material. The poem employs Meek’s own whirling lines to glue text from the Wright Brothers’ autobiographies with accounts of the Apollo missions, these two distinct ends of the historical aviation spectrum preparing us for exactly what the poem’s title promises. These blurbs of ambition and innovation are balanced by press releases touting the development of underground nuclear explosions as a means of excavation as well as quotes from an informative guide describing how to build one’s very own fallout shelter. This long, multitextured format allows Meek to approach the subject of science, with all its successes and shortcomings, from several angles at once. The poem is really a sort of essay-in-verse, completely different from anything else in this volume. What allows it to cohere with the whole collection is its concern with Meek’s earlier obsessions: the matter, texture, and possible danger of human imagination. The poems in Burn are charged with powerful complexity that is not complex for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of representing the imagination as process, and how the ever-changing fabric affects the observer’s notion of the world, resulting in a work that both amazes and rewards.
--F. Daniel Rzicznek, Mid-American Review
Published in Mid-American Review XXVI (Fall 2005)
Sandra Meek’s second full-length collection of poems combines a remarkable intensity of image and description with a heightened attention to craft as well as outside textual material. Meek is not after the tight and compact focus of the short lyric but, rather, a rambling and discursive type of philosophically driven meditation. In “Flood Coverage,” the uses of image and simile transcend mere description; instead, they become the focus of the poem as it unfurls. Each image ushers the reader onto the poem’s next ornate, delicate terrace. Every line builds upon the last, and gestures toward the next:
Some nights the soul gets trapped
in the skull, a kernel’s undetonated genes ticking the complete
unwritten narrative. Some gifted in rare flashes can hear
the precise shade between indigo and midnight
blue. Mostly, we spend our lives toneblind,
recorded mid tape like candles spun midwick, each end unlit so
safely referred to as eternal.
One gets the eerie feeling from these tightly tuned and heavily enjambed lines that each is essential to the whole of the poem. “Flood Coverage” is but one poem in an entire collection that operates in such fashion. In many of these poems, the best line is every line.
Meek’s willingness to include every detail of her vision is the driving force behind the poems as they flower relentlessly through the first sections of the book. In the poem “Wreck,” the intensity of description struggles palpably against the enjambment and the continuous refusal of the poem to ground itself in any particular narrative context. Instead, Meek makes description and metaphor themselves her framework:
If a shell spirals an ocean, its alpine absence
hums a glacial cool beyond atmosphere, what the earthbound
imagine of space, silence of ice and pale,
dwarfed flowers. The mountain goats’ drift dissolves
the spine of bleached boulders scattered
above timberline—a glacier’s remnant
skates the road…
Here the images emerge at the beginning of each line, the rich adjectives and thickly woven sounds evoking a breathlessness, as though the poet is simply unable to cease the flow of description. For each concrete image (the mountain goats, the glacier), an accompanying action or description arrives out of pure imagination.
Ironically, after fifty pages of nonstop stylistic exclamation, the center piece of the book, a fourteen-page poem entitled “A Short History of Flight,” combines all of the elements that appear before it with extensive raids on outside material. The poem employs Meek’s own whirling lines to glue text from the Wright Brothers’ autobiographies with accounts of the Apollo missions, these two distinct ends of the historical aviation spectrum preparing us for exactly what the poem’s title promises. These blurbs of ambition and innovation are balanced by press releases touting the development of underground nuclear explosions as a means of excavation as well as quotes from an informative guide describing how to build one’s very own fallout shelter. This long, multitextured format allows Meek to approach the subject of science, with all its successes and shortcomings, from several angles at once. The poem is really a sort of essay-in-verse, completely different from anything else in this volume. What allows it to cohere with the whole collection is its concern with Meek’s earlier obsessions: the matter, texture, and possible danger of human imagination. The poems in Burn are charged with powerful complexity that is not complex for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of representing the imagination as process, and how the ever-changing fabric affects the observer’s notion of the world, resulting in a work that both amazes and rewards.
--F. Daniel Rzicznek, Mid-American Review
Published in Mid-American Review XXVI (Fall 2005)