A Love Song to Language
Burn. Sandra Meek Minneapolis, MN: Elixir
Press, 2005. 80 pp. $14.00 (paperback).
In 2003, Sandra Meek, author of the chapbook The Circumference of Arrival (Elixir), was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry for her debut collection. Nomadic Foundations (Elixir). Two years later, Meek has retumed with a second book of poetry, Burn, also from Elixir Press. Burn, containing Meek's finest work to date, is an important and impressive
collection and one that deserves the attention of anyone interested in serious contemporary poetry.
The stanza forms and line lengths in these poems vary greatly from the short "Wreck," eleven couplets completed by a single four-syllable line, to "A Short History of Flight," the generous fifteen page poem in which Meek's lines weave in and out of passages quoted from John Glenn, Orville and Wilhur Wright, and the Book of the Campfire Girls,
to name only a few.
One feels that, were Meek forced to choose between narrative and image in poetry, she would pick imagery every time. In Burn, we are presented more often with portraits than stories, poems asking to be read again and again for what one discovers upon each rereading. And here are poems begging to be read aloud for their lyricism, the musicality of rhythm and word choice Meek brings to the free verse form. Note the fluidity of language and precise detail used in "The Kitchen" to evoke the image of snails: "...each...a pearl on a silver / cursive chain, something like rain / threading the concrete."
The poems in Burn do not always make for easy reading. Many are dense, difficult pieces, which is not to say they are academic or lifeless, but language driven, certainly, and subtle in their gift of meaning. Despite the extensive vocabulary employed in Burn, the voices in these poems are never condescending. Meek favors complex language, but she rarely lets verbosity get in the way of making a simple point simply, as in "Doctrine of Signatures," where she writes, "I sketch stars to remember light." And not every line of Burn is weighted with description or linguistic games. Occasionally, Meek takes chances with a tone that verges on the conversational, as in "Negotiating Versions of Forever" where she writes "We've been there before," and you feel as though she is speaking directly to you. Several poems even engage the reader by positing questions like, "Didn't Beethoven think Life beautiful because he so / hated his own?" and "What was it we were saying?"
Meek knows something about everything, or, if not, she makes us believe she does. In Burn, Meek translates Latin, quotes John Milton and John James Audubon, borrows from the Oxford English Dictionary, makes frequent Biblical allusions, references music theory, and embraces several branches of the hard sciences. Yet, she manages to do this without
showing off. For example, in "Tillandsia Usneoides" (the title the Latin name for Spanish moss), Meek conveys both the beauty inherent in scientific principle and an understanding of nature that goes well beyond a mere appreciation of the natural world. She notices what we often overlook, and what she shows us can be striking and sinister:
You could walk under it your whole life
and never know it flowers, magnolia's waxy moons
eclipsing the blooms, never know
it houses chiggers, red flecks
of dormant fire.
Consider, too, the poetry Meek makes of what we call moss in the same poem:
...Science the art
of elaborate misnaming, it's not a moss
but an herb, related to the pineapple, as Irish moss
is an alga, reindeer moss a lichen, and the air fern's
not a plant at all but an oceanic skeleton . . .
Not all of these poems, however, are earthbound. As Meek says in "Negotiating Versions of Forever," "Nothing's set / but in motion," and these poems and their inhabitants want to take fiight. At least two themes pervade Burn, and one is flight, specifically, man's obsession with fiight and the way in which, like Icarus, we all seek, ultimately, to defy gravity, to leave earth. As in John Updike's last collection Americana and Other Poems (Knopf), more than one poem here is narrated by a passenger on an airplane. But, in a collection bound up in the beauty of the natural world, it is only through this ironic submission to manmade aircraft that anyone in Meek's poems gets off the ground, for, in Burn, wings seldom work. Here, wings are "wet," "useless," or "charred," the angels' "prosthetic," and even the crows' wings are "crepe-paper." In "Eschatology," ascension becomes delay, and wings are confetti. And, in "A Short History of Flight," it is only through fire that man, unencumbered by machine, becomes airborne, as we bear witness to "people / slowly rising as ash." Later in the poem. Meek taunts us, contrasting the flight of birds with the fiight of man. In doing so, she assaults our appreciation of flight, revealing the inextricable bond between fiight and death, all of this accomplished with a haunting list that moves from birds to blimps to bombs; "ivory gull. . . starling . . . zeppelin . . . torpedo plane . . . little boy."
The second predominant idea in Burn is that of reproduction, or, in a spiritual sense, rebirth. Meek triggers this concept repeatedly using similar language from poem to poem. In the course of reading Burn, we come across "duplication," "repetition," "retelling," "multiplication," "mimicking," "revision," "regathered," "retraced," "reform," and "rebirth" with the more sterile "replicated" echoed no less than four times throughout the collection.
As rebirth comes only after death, death and destruction become essential elements in many of the poems in Burn. Little apocalypses factor into several poems, from a flood in the slightly cynical "Flood Coverage," in which we see the "Apocalypse furnished / in standard shots," to the forest fires of "Reconfigurings," to the manmade chaos of "On the Modifications of Clouds," where, in a reflection on the collapse of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, "Two columns of air / [arel still the city's tallest structure..." From such chaos, life is spawned, but always in a new and startling incarnation. In the title poem, we are reminded that, in movies, the Mummy's cloths were not meant for "preservation of decay but [as] the chosen / version of revision." In "Flood Coverage," we witness "the phoenix-rise of a neighborhood—/the city a pillar of powdered sugar and rain."
In "Birds of America," one of the strongest poems in the collection, the ideas of flight, death, and rebirth are united, and we face a new ideology: "killing to preserve." The poem acknowledges the disturbing fact that Audubon had to kill the birds he sought to capture in two dimensions, for, "Flying, / the heron was a blue-grey smudge. Death supplied the details—/ dark eyebrow streak, red eye." The poem considers the way in which Audubon must have seen birds, as "Whole flights of taxonomy / freed of stalled bodies, the third / dimension of regret." Here, birds sacrifice flight in order to be reincarnated in paint, nature succumbing to the hand of man. So goes the paradox: in seeking to preserve, man destroys, as in the poem "Twelve Days," in which we are reminded how chemicals used to clean cave paintings "ate from each zebra the delicate / spindle of legs."
The collection is not without a dark sense of humor. Meek makes good use of her wit, observing the absurdity inherent in certain aspects of American culture, both past and present. In two poems. Meek juxtaposes death and atomic warfare with passages from In Time of Emergency: A Citizen's Handbook with its antique recipes for fallout shelters disguised as bookcases and snack bars. Not one for the typical love poem, in "Porphyritic Andesite: A Valentine," Meek mocks the
lengths we go to in order to associate ourselves with what we find beautiful. Smirking at anyone who has ever paid to name a star for a lover, Meek reminds us that in relationships, "what's left unsaid / is faint as the distant suns we keep / naming for each other."
Death takes center stage toward the end of Burn where Meek delivers her most moving poem, a portrait of the narrator's mother that examines life and death poignantly without lapsing into either morbidity or sentimentality. In "Epitaph, In Process," the narrator watches from a hospital room window as a cancer-stricken mother smokes outside. Awaiting her return, the speaker recognizes what is to come. The premonition's source? The mother's heart monitor:
...your absence
has been noted on the monitor's
flickering face as a continuous drag
of light, my angelic zero.
In the end, we are left with nothing but language. In "On the Modifications of Clouds," Meek writes, "where / is it written, the taxonomy / for Paradise, language made universal / by its dying?" But, for Meek, universality is not immortality. For permanence has no place, it seems, even in language. As we are told in "AShort History of Flight": "The illusion of forever: print on a page." If forever is impossible, then perhaps the best we can hope for is that these poems, Meek's words, last a long, long time.
--David James Poissant
Burn. Sandra Meek Minneapolis, MN: Elixir
Press, 2005. 80 pp. $14.00 (paperback).
In 2003, Sandra Meek, author of the chapbook The Circumference of Arrival (Elixir), was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry for her debut collection. Nomadic Foundations (Elixir). Two years later, Meek has retumed with a second book of poetry, Burn, also from Elixir Press. Burn, containing Meek's finest work to date, is an important and impressive
collection and one that deserves the attention of anyone interested in serious contemporary poetry.
The stanza forms and line lengths in these poems vary greatly from the short "Wreck," eleven couplets completed by a single four-syllable line, to "A Short History of Flight," the generous fifteen page poem in which Meek's lines weave in and out of passages quoted from John Glenn, Orville and Wilhur Wright, and the Book of the Campfire Girls,
to name only a few.
One feels that, were Meek forced to choose between narrative and image in poetry, she would pick imagery every time. In Burn, we are presented more often with portraits than stories, poems asking to be read again and again for what one discovers upon each rereading. And here are poems begging to be read aloud for their lyricism, the musicality of rhythm and word choice Meek brings to the free verse form. Note the fluidity of language and precise detail used in "The Kitchen" to evoke the image of snails: "...each...a pearl on a silver / cursive chain, something like rain / threading the concrete."
The poems in Burn do not always make for easy reading. Many are dense, difficult pieces, which is not to say they are academic or lifeless, but language driven, certainly, and subtle in their gift of meaning. Despite the extensive vocabulary employed in Burn, the voices in these poems are never condescending. Meek favors complex language, but she rarely lets verbosity get in the way of making a simple point simply, as in "Doctrine of Signatures," where she writes, "I sketch stars to remember light." And not every line of Burn is weighted with description or linguistic games. Occasionally, Meek takes chances with a tone that verges on the conversational, as in "Negotiating Versions of Forever" where she writes "We've been there before," and you feel as though she is speaking directly to you. Several poems even engage the reader by positing questions like, "Didn't Beethoven think Life beautiful because he so / hated his own?" and "What was it we were saying?"
Meek knows something about everything, or, if not, she makes us believe she does. In Burn, Meek translates Latin, quotes John Milton and John James Audubon, borrows from the Oxford English Dictionary, makes frequent Biblical allusions, references music theory, and embraces several branches of the hard sciences. Yet, she manages to do this without
showing off. For example, in "Tillandsia Usneoides" (the title the Latin name for Spanish moss), Meek conveys both the beauty inherent in scientific principle and an understanding of nature that goes well beyond a mere appreciation of the natural world. She notices what we often overlook, and what she shows us can be striking and sinister:
You could walk under it your whole life
and never know it flowers, magnolia's waxy moons
eclipsing the blooms, never know
it houses chiggers, red flecks
of dormant fire.
Consider, too, the poetry Meek makes of what we call moss in the same poem:
...Science the art
of elaborate misnaming, it's not a moss
but an herb, related to the pineapple, as Irish moss
is an alga, reindeer moss a lichen, and the air fern's
not a plant at all but an oceanic skeleton . . .
Not all of these poems, however, are earthbound. As Meek says in "Negotiating Versions of Forever," "Nothing's set / but in motion," and these poems and their inhabitants want to take fiight. At least two themes pervade Burn, and one is flight, specifically, man's obsession with fiight and the way in which, like Icarus, we all seek, ultimately, to defy gravity, to leave earth. As in John Updike's last collection Americana and Other Poems (Knopf), more than one poem here is narrated by a passenger on an airplane. But, in a collection bound up in the beauty of the natural world, it is only through this ironic submission to manmade aircraft that anyone in Meek's poems gets off the ground, for, in Burn, wings seldom work. Here, wings are "wet," "useless," or "charred," the angels' "prosthetic," and even the crows' wings are "crepe-paper." In "Eschatology," ascension becomes delay, and wings are confetti. And, in "A Short History of Flight," it is only through fire that man, unencumbered by machine, becomes airborne, as we bear witness to "people / slowly rising as ash." Later in the poem. Meek taunts us, contrasting the flight of birds with the fiight of man. In doing so, she assaults our appreciation of flight, revealing the inextricable bond between fiight and death, all of this accomplished with a haunting list that moves from birds to blimps to bombs; "ivory gull. . . starling . . . zeppelin . . . torpedo plane . . . little boy."
The second predominant idea in Burn is that of reproduction, or, in a spiritual sense, rebirth. Meek triggers this concept repeatedly using similar language from poem to poem. In the course of reading Burn, we come across "duplication," "repetition," "retelling," "multiplication," "mimicking," "revision," "regathered," "retraced," "reform," and "rebirth" with the more sterile "replicated" echoed no less than four times throughout the collection.
As rebirth comes only after death, death and destruction become essential elements in many of the poems in Burn. Little apocalypses factor into several poems, from a flood in the slightly cynical "Flood Coverage," in which we see the "Apocalypse furnished / in standard shots," to the forest fires of "Reconfigurings," to the manmade chaos of "On the Modifications of Clouds," where, in a reflection on the collapse of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, "Two columns of air / [arel still the city's tallest structure..." From such chaos, life is spawned, but always in a new and startling incarnation. In the title poem, we are reminded that, in movies, the Mummy's cloths were not meant for "preservation of decay but [as] the chosen / version of revision." In "Flood Coverage," we witness "the phoenix-rise of a neighborhood—/the city a pillar of powdered sugar and rain."
In "Birds of America," one of the strongest poems in the collection, the ideas of flight, death, and rebirth are united, and we face a new ideology: "killing to preserve." The poem acknowledges the disturbing fact that Audubon had to kill the birds he sought to capture in two dimensions, for, "Flying, / the heron was a blue-grey smudge. Death supplied the details—/ dark eyebrow streak, red eye." The poem considers the way in which Audubon must have seen birds, as "Whole flights of taxonomy / freed of stalled bodies, the third / dimension of regret." Here, birds sacrifice flight in order to be reincarnated in paint, nature succumbing to the hand of man. So goes the paradox: in seeking to preserve, man destroys, as in the poem "Twelve Days," in which we are reminded how chemicals used to clean cave paintings "ate from each zebra the delicate / spindle of legs."
The collection is not without a dark sense of humor. Meek makes good use of her wit, observing the absurdity inherent in certain aspects of American culture, both past and present. In two poems. Meek juxtaposes death and atomic warfare with passages from In Time of Emergency: A Citizen's Handbook with its antique recipes for fallout shelters disguised as bookcases and snack bars. Not one for the typical love poem, in "Porphyritic Andesite: A Valentine," Meek mocks the
lengths we go to in order to associate ourselves with what we find beautiful. Smirking at anyone who has ever paid to name a star for a lover, Meek reminds us that in relationships, "what's left unsaid / is faint as the distant suns we keep / naming for each other."
Death takes center stage toward the end of Burn where Meek delivers her most moving poem, a portrait of the narrator's mother that examines life and death poignantly without lapsing into either morbidity or sentimentality. In "Epitaph, In Process," the narrator watches from a hospital room window as a cancer-stricken mother smokes outside. Awaiting her return, the speaker recognizes what is to come. The premonition's source? The mother's heart monitor:
...your absence
has been noted on the monitor's
flickering face as a continuous drag
of light, my angelic zero.
In the end, we are left with nothing but language. In "On the Modifications of Clouds," Meek writes, "where / is it written, the taxonomy / for Paradise, language made universal / by its dying?" But, for Meek, universality is not immortality. For permanence has no place, it seems, even in language. As we are told in "AShort History of Flight": "The illusion of forever: print on a page." If forever is impossible, then perhaps the best we can hope for is that these poems, Meek's words, last a long, long time.
--David James Poissant