Road Scatter by Sandra Meek.
New York: Persea Books, 2012.
86 pages. $15.95, paper.
Sandra Meek's fourth poetry collection, Road Scatter, is an elegy propelled by her mother's death. Many poems deal directly with death and the vulnerability and disintegration of the physical body, while others look outward at nature, relationships, and common experience, but all with the keen focus and almost slow-motion intensity that loss brings to Meek's perspective.
Some of the most powerful poems are unexpectedly beautiful accounts of the horrific realities of hospital, illness, and death. "Chemo Session Six" gives this description: "Translucence, organ-soft, bagged on its steel / trident: drip of orphaned light, amber blister // draining to clarity. Healing is the suture / of poison and poison; the body, cups of sand // castled at shoreline ..." Not only sensual and physical descriptions of such scenes, but emotional tragedy and change are vividly revealed in poems such as "In Case, Since You Left, You've Been Wondering," where Meek admits, "... Nurses and orderlies / came running, needles drawn, and what I did was exactly / nothing but think never again will I be able to forget / the body is a slackening slab of terror."
Meek is intent on inventing deeper methods for describing a world that contains such pain. She is acutely aware of the gift of breathing and the privilege of seeing. In her need for precision, she invents verbs, hyphenates adjectives and nouns, provides layers of imagery for common objects that now take on mystery. For example, in "New Construction," she indeed constructs new verbs like "marooning," "staccatoed," and "volts away," hyphenated adjectives such as "copper-laced" and "storm-gnawed," and unexpected combinations like "bandaged roof."
The poem "Trapeze" literally swings one way and then reverses the word order to swing back, creating more hyphenations by joining nouns and verbs repeated from the first stanza: "web-scarabed," "wind-bridged," and "night-brooching." The poem "Clearing the House" addresses the duty of disposing of possessions after death, and Meek's unexpected verbs make these lines even more striking; "... a fading bruise's gold/stammering the carpet" and "... a dropped stone // unstilling an umber pool." This word play and invention brings readers to attention, prepared to decipher the poet's unique observations.
As Meek explores dense layers of sensory experience born out of traumatic loss, she reveals a new way to see and describe the world. Hypersensitive to her surroundings, her actions, and her memories, she makes the commonplace tremble and shine with meaning. This is a book to spend time with, digest section by short section, and use as a focused lens through which to view mortality and spheres of human existence.
--LewEllyn Hallett, MAR
Mid-American Review XXXIII:2 (2013)
New York: Persea Books, 2012.
86 pages. $15.95, paper.
Sandra Meek's fourth poetry collection, Road Scatter, is an elegy propelled by her mother's death. Many poems deal directly with death and the vulnerability and disintegration of the physical body, while others look outward at nature, relationships, and common experience, but all with the keen focus and almost slow-motion intensity that loss brings to Meek's perspective.
Some of the most powerful poems are unexpectedly beautiful accounts of the horrific realities of hospital, illness, and death. "Chemo Session Six" gives this description: "Translucence, organ-soft, bagged on its steel / trident: drip of orphaned light, amber blister // draining to clarity. Healing is the suture / of poison and poison; the body, cups of sand // castled at shoreline ..." Not only sensual and physical descriptions of such scenes, but emotional tragedy and change are vividly revealed in poems such as "In Case, Since You Left, You've Been Wondering," where Meek admits, "... Nurses and orderlies / came running, needles drawn, and what I did was exactly / nothing but think never again will I be able to forget / the body is a slackening slab of terror."
Meek is intent on inventing deeper methods for describing a world that contains such pain. She is acutely aware of the gift of breathing and the privilege of seeing. In her need for precision, she invents verbs, hyphenates adjectives and nouns, provides layers of imagery for common objects that now take on mystery. For example, in "New Construction," she indeed constructs new verbs like "marooning," "staccatoed," and "volts away," hyphenated adjectives such as "copper-laced" and "storm-gnawed," and unexpected combinations like "bandaged roof."
The poem "Trapeze" literally swings one way and then reverses the word order to swing back, creating more hyphenations by joining nouns and verbs repeated from the first stanza: "web-scarabed," "wind-bridged," and "night-brooching." The poem "Clearing the House" addresses the duty of disposing of possessions after death, and Meek's unexpected verbs make these lines even more striking; "... a fading bruise's gold/stammering the carpet" and "... a dropped stone // unstilling an umber pool." This word play and invention brings readers to attention, prepared to decipher the poet's unique observations.
As Meek explores dense layers of sensory experience born out of traumatic loss, she reveals a new way to see and describe the world. Hypersensitive to her surroundings, her actions, and her memories, she makes the commonplace tremble and shine with meaning. This is a book to spend time with, digest section by short section, and use as a focused lens through which to view mortality and spheres of human existence.
--LewEllyn Hallett, MAR
Mid-American Review XXXIII:2 (2013)