Nomadic Foundations
by Sandra Meek
2002
reviewed by Dan Beachy-Quick
Paradox heals language by using fracture, not as a strategy, but as a balm that wounds. If the poem must suffer contradiction in order to stay true to the writer’s experience, to her meaning, then it does so in the realization that language, to speak truly, must speak past language’s bounds. That terrifying edge in which words press against what words cannot say produces—to take Dickinson’s phrase—“a cleaving in the Mind,” where thought unravels from though, where memory unthreads itself from experience, where the windblown sand erases the doorsteps of the desert traveler. Sandra Meek’s Nomadic Foundations begins in paradox in-prismed in paradox.
Yes, simply, the title: two words that erase each other. But as I read and reread Meek’s book, I kept coming back to the cover image and untitled prefatory poem. The cover is a photograph, taken by Meek herself, of a cave painting in Africa, the pigment created (as Meek mentions later in the book) with the bonding agent of the artist’s own anonymous blood. The scene, it seems, is a hunt. The opening poem—anonymous in title—tells of slitting an animal’s throat: “I was given a sliver / of tongue, of the tongue that belled in that head / roped to the tree as the blade / narrowed.” The double prism—photo, poem—that opens Nomadic Foundations creates the tense space of paradox. The hunt that at one moment was wet paint on a wall and is now time past memory, to the reenactment of the same scene, the same gift, the violence by which life, this gift, continues. Meek sees the cave painting; she experiences it. She puts the animal’s tongue in her mouth; she writes it: “It tasted // of river, a bed of mud, near clarity / stammering over stone.”
---
An old wisdom claims that the language in which an event is described is the same language by which the event occurred. Sandra Meek’s first book of poetry locates itself within the experience of living in Botswana, and her words take part in the rapture and rupture she’s trying to record. A deep poetic faith is inherent in the book’s purpose. Meek seeks to record and reconstruct an experience that threatens language’s ability to describe what she has lived through. Meek, with us invited along on the page, is “re / membering.” She is putting the body of experience back together—if she can. The danger, of course, is also how language changes the experience it records. In Meek’s “Citizenship, Bophuthatswana,” the first motion into experience is entrance (in both senses of the word):
My face matches the face
I carry, my blue country wins me border
Stamps, crossings.
implicit in the sense that “my face matches the face / I carry” is paradoxical split into “otherness” that accompanies identification. The opening question is simple to ask and terrible to consider: Are you who you are?
The first section of the book—“Reply Without Gazelles”—continues the question. And the answer is troubling because it trembles with honesty. “Are these the faces the border crossed?” asks Meek in “Possession.” She senses that what we enter, enters us. It’s easy to say that the line between subject and object is uncertain—but it is quite a different gesture to show how deeply penetrating the effort to see is with what is being seen; and in the dark African night, how one can feel presence looking back, implicating sight with sight returned. The poet is not the authority, just the author. And in asking, “What’s it like / to wake to gazelles every morning tell / me about Africa,” Meek offers a surprising answer. No, not “gazelles.” But: “Each Saturday we passed / printed pamphlets, faces coming // off on our hands.” Beyond the ink smudged off by her hands, she is also speaking of her own face, her own surprising hands that led her here, that are making her, in part, unknown.
A photo is light memorized. A poem is an opposite process, making words/worlds appear by darkening the bright, blank page with ink.
In this photo, I send you light
shaking in white sand, shattered mirrors. That dark dot
is me.
Meek begins this poem, “Foundations for Fire,” by sending the stereotypical traveler’s photo as a memento to the one who remains at home—in this case, her friend, who it seems is pregnant. Equating herself with the inky dot strikes an odd chord of wonder that resonates, as wonder so often does, with a harmony that borders on horror. Here, around the firelight, hyenas circle in the night, “as if searching out the gate.” Meek becomes infected by this otherworld, sent as a photo in an envelope, where “you build a fire, or you give / in to the night.”
On the other side
of the world, I see you at the center
of that night, pale under the ghostly cell
of a full moon, and in that cold light I
am circling,
circling with these words…
Meek recognizes that unless one is the fire, the light that seems to offer safety in a lit orb against the night, then like the hyena, one is always that creature circling it. How far we’ve come from the face that “matches the face / I carry.”
Landscape, when lived in, Meek seems to say, is presence. Presence exerts a force on those present in it. And being “in it,” to truly abide in a place so deeply that the boundary line delineating self from world becomes a hazy border at all, is where Meek finds herself located—at home and not at home.
“Toward Gestures” pinpoints that difficulty. Meek constantly transposes excerpted language from travel guides with her now “guideless” language. “Transient skeletons,” “bone grass knee high,” “spiked heads / of desert aloes,” and “green wounds” attend to the crisis of language brought to place (all through the focus of Meek’s own mind). Juxtaposed against that tourist’s code of where to visit and what to see are Meek’s jagged, almost unimaginable distortions of landscape into body, of ruin, fear, diamond mines, life circling and circled by death. She has lost an entire language in which the world used to take shape; she’s gained the awful power of the poem.
Memory, like a pin through a butterfly, attempts to fix in place, for contemplation, that which, by its nature, is alive and fleeting. But memory itself is alive. The wisdom in Meek’s book is to ask: how does one pin the butterfly, with its own wings, to itself? Against every effort at exact description, comes a more complex reality, “the fossil of absence.”
Whatever we had we failed it. The answers
all made up. Geometry
of skinned goats splitting the trees.
Architecture of broken pews
rowing the dirt. Language
a snag, what we’d
forgotten to say. The history
of the darkness of light,
vanishing points vanished.
Meek finds herself, and places us, in a world without horizon. I do not mean a world without hope. Far from it. I mean a world in which forgetting is a kind of honest and actual attention. A world in which the speaker earns a true humility—and from that wide ground writes poems of actual experience. I don’t know how to emphasize enough that gift, except to turn to her poems again.
In “Termites,” Meek writes, “the winged ones / silver and spiral up as if they would rise / all the way to heaven and demand to be heard.” But they don’t. Heaven is not in the travel guide. The termites lose their wings and crawl back into the earth on which they fall. And Meek has in her hands their wings, “thin as bible paper,” for flight.
by Sandra Meek
2002
reviewed by Dan Beachy-Quick
Paradox heals language by using fracture, not as a strategy, but as a balm that wounds. If the poem must suffer contradiction in order to stay true to the writer’s experience, to her meaning, then it does so in the realization that language, to speak truly, must speak past language’s bounds. That terrifying edge in which words press against what words cannot say produces—to take Dickinson’s phrase—“a cleaving in the Mind,” where thought unravels from though, where memory unthreads itself from experience, where the windblown sand erases the doorsteps of the desert traveler. Sandra Meek’s Nomadic Foundations begins in paradox in-prismed in paradox.
Yes, simply, the title: two words that erase each other. But as I read and reread Meek’s book, I kept coming back to the cover image and untitled prefatory poem. The cover is a photograph, taken by Meek herself, of a cave painting in Africa, the pigment created (as Meek mentions later in the book) with the bonding agent of the artist’s own anonymous blood. The scene, it seems, is a hunt. The opening poem—anonymous in title—tells of slitting an animal’s throat: “I was given a sliver / of tongue, of the tongue that belled in that head / roped to the tree as the blade / narrowed.” The double prism—photo, poem—that opens Nomadic Foundations creates the tense space of paradox. The hunt that at one moment was wet paint on a wall and is now time past memory, to the reenactment of the same scene, the same gift, the violence by which life, this gift, continues. Meek sees the cave painting; she experiences it. She puts the animal’s tongue in her mouth; she writes it: “It tasted // of river, a bed of mud, near clarity / stammering over stone.”
---
An old wisdom claims that the language in which an event is described is the same language by which the event occurred. Sandra Meek’s first book of poetry locates itself within the experience of living in Botswana, and her words take part in the rapture and rupture she’s trying to record. A deep poetic faith is inherent in the book’s purpose. Meek seeks to record and reconstruct an experience that threatens language’s ability to describe what she has lived through. Meek, with us invited along on the page, is “re / membering.” She is putting the body of experience back together—if she can. The danger, of course, is also how language changes the experience it records. In Meek’s “Citizenship, Bophuthatswana,” the first motion into experience is entrance (in both senses of the word):
My face matches the face
I carry, my blue country wins me border
Stamps, crossings.
implicit in the sense that “my face matches the face / I carry” is paradoxical split into “otherness” that accompanies identification. The opening question is simple to ask and terrible to consider: Are you who you are?
The first section of the book—“Reply Without Gazelles”—continues the question. And the answer is troubling because it trembles with honesty. “Are these the faces the border crossed?” asks Meek in “Possession.” She senses that what we enter, enters us. It’s easy to say that the line between subject and object is uncertain—but it is quite a different gesture to show how deeply penetrating the effort to see is with what is being seen; and in the dark African night, how one can feel presence looking back, implicating sight with sight returned. The poet is not the authority, just the author. And in asking, “What’s it like / to wake to gazelles every morning tell / me about Africa,” Meek offers a surprising answer. No, not “gazelles.” But: “Each Saturday we passed / printed pamphlets, faces coming // off on our hands.” Beyond the ink smudged off by her hands, she is also speaking of her own face, her own surprising hands that led her here, that are making her, in part, unknown.
A photo is light memorized. A poem is an opposite process, making words/worlds appear by darkening the bright, blank page with ink.
In this photo, I send you light
shaking in white sand, shattered mirrors. That dark dot
is me.
Meek begins this poem, “Foundations for Fire,” by sending the stereotypical traveler’s photo as a memento to the one who remains at home—in this case, her friend, who it seems is pregnant. Equating herself with the inky dot strikes an odd chord of wonder that resonates, as wonder so often does, with a harmony that borders on horror. Here, around the firelight, hyenas circle in the night, “as if searching out the gate.” Meek becomes infected by this otherworld, sent as a photo in an envelope, where “you build a fire, or you give / in to the night.”
On the other side
of the world, I see you at the center
of that night, pale under the ghostly cell
of a full moon, and in that cold light I
am circling,
circling with these words…
Meek recognizes that unless one is the fire, the light that seems to offer safety in a lit orb against the night, then like the hyena, one is always that creature circling it. How far we’ve come from the face that “matches the face / I carry.”
Landscape, when lived in, Meek seems to say, is presence. Presence exerts a force on those present in it. And being “in it,” to truly abide in a place so deeply that the boundary line delineating self from world becomes a hazy border at all, is where Meek finds herself located—at home and not at home.
“Toward Gestures” pinpoints that difficulty. Meek constantly transposes excerpted language from travel guides with her now “guideless” language. “Transient skeletons,” “bone grass knee high,” “spiked heads / of desert aloes,” and “green wounds” attend to the crisis of language brought to place (all through the focus of Meek’s own mind). Juxtaposed against that tourist’s code of where to visit and what to see are Meek’s jagged, almost unimaginable distortions of landscape into body, of ruin, fear, diamond mines, life circling and circled by death. She has lost an entire language in which the world used to take shape; she’s gained the awful power of the poem.
Memory, like a pin through a butterfly, attempts to fix in place, for contemplation, that which, by its nature, is alive and fleeting. But memory itself is alive. The wisdom in Meek’s book is to ask: how does one pin the butterfly, with its own wings, to itself? Against every effort at exact description, comes a more complex reality, “the fossil of absence.”
Whatever we had we failed it. The answers
all made up. Geometry
of skinned goats splitting the trees.
Architecture of broken pews
rowing the dirt. Language
a snag, what we’d
forgotten to say. The history
of the darkness of light,
vanishing points vanished.
Meek finds herself, and places us, in a world without horizon. I do not mean a world without hope. Far from it. I mean a world in which forgetting is a kind of honest and actual attention. A world in which the speaker earns a true humility—and from that wide ground writes poems of actual experience. I don’t know how to emphasize enough that gift, except to turn to her poems again.
In “Termites,” Meek writes, “the winged ones / silver and spiral up as if they would rise / all the way to heaven and demand to be heard.” But they don’t. Heaven is not in the travel guide. The termites lose their wings and crawl back into the earth on which they fall. And Meek has in her hands their wings, “thin as bible paper,” for flight.