equilibrium's form by Susanne Dyckman

Shearsman Books, 2007

Reviewed by Anne Heide




Susanne Dyckman’s first full-length book, equilibrium’s form, understands where “the space of possibility/is an appetite,” where the unknown is both a generative and consumptive force. The poems in this book insistently document “what is known,” though only in partial image, as if trying to set fragmentary particulars into the realm of the immediate known, leaving all else to question. Shushing the insistent noise of finitude for the sake of a patient querying, Dyckman has created an open-ended elegy, a proposal of patience that takes the form of an active questioning, one that swerves from the passive finite. This is a book where shadows take root as the “space of possibility,” the grey unknown into which Dyckman roots the small insistent.

Although the poems in equilibrium’s form steer away from the definite known, the book is nonetheless preoccupied with the ways in which we know. Dyckman questions the way in which knowing takes shape through the act of documenting minutia, how the act of knowing is parceled into specificity. Minutia is known, and knowledge comes in portion:

                sky bone arm

                eye

                what is known is

                dusk silence hand scar

                not a sound but

                word

                air

This is not the duality of a shadow world and a finite world, but a proposal for a world of greater precision. “Sky” becomes “dusk,” “arm” becomes “hand,” and we are translated into a locale of increased specificity, where minutia is quite seriously known without pretense or irony, and the beginnings of knowledge are made into deliberate detail. The greater picture is that there is no greater picture; the limbs of a scene are the center of it. The language itself is potentially fragmentary in that the semantic possibilities at work extend beyond the singular. No one sense can be made of the text; it is a work of detail that is fragmentary not because something is missing, but because any attempt at completion would fail the text.

Dyckman’s field of accrual asks for knowledge to come individually, in shadowy spaces, in illegibility. Although there echoes of Plato’s cave, this text calls a different sense of reality into being: “dipping fingers/in shadow play/is all I know.” Shadow isn’t illusion, but the hopeful unknown: “I will the shadow/swallowing whole.” Shadow is willed into existence in order to conceal and complicate untrustworthy clarity.

The book never loses its concern for this deliberately partial and self-specific knowledge. If the fragment stands in for the whole, if it is more representative in its partial presence, then Dyckman has written an epic in facets, calling for specificity to stand in stead for the whole, revealing a more complete picture in the gaps. This awareness of the fragmentary in language extends to the fragmentary body. The remnant of the scar appears as a trace of physical memory, “who or where known by the finger’s trace/across the scar turned pink.” It is the trace left from action, the proof that an event occurred, that something can be known:

                                     the honed

                flint           retracting           heals

                syllables hidden                behind

                more syllables                there’s the scar

Here, it is the unending strata of healed-over language that points to the difficulty in representation. But these are syllables, not words. Here, parts of speech are not incoherent when parceled, but contribute to a density of meaning, of proof. Something here happened.

But something violent to the body. In the prose poems of the book, the elegiac tone is most narratively present. Illness arrives in the prose sections of the book, where information is more fluid, filled with story. Although these are the most narratively sure moments of the text, they seem deliberately uneasy in their certainty, full of unease about looming illness, inevitable loss, and the difficulty of using story to fill that space: “We are almost the same height and weight, like twins, except her walk is slow and I need to hold back to match her pace. Her skin is brown, not a healthy brown but a shade of sickness.” These prose poems ask for stillness; like the particular images that are known, the tone is one of stasis: keep patience, let this moment linger: “stay          be still          you are stone.” In these brief moments of elegy, another shadow is cast across the manuscript, a proof of loss.

Dyckman’s book is both tenuously wrought and utterly concrete. It is the tension between these two extremes of knowing that sets the pace for this deliberate and elegantly crafted consideration of the frailty of individual knowledge.

**

Susanne Dyckman was born in Chicago, and has lived in cities on both coasts of the U.S., finally settling in Albany, California, where she curates the Evelyn Ave. reading series. She is the author of two chapbooks, Transiting Indigo (Etherdome Press) and Counterweight (Woodland Editions). Her writing has appeared in various publications, including Pomona Valley Review, Switchback, 26, Marginalia and First Intensity. After being named a recipient of the Five Fingers Review poetry award, she was invited to join the journal's editorial staff. She is currently a thesis adviser for the University of San Francisco's MFA in Writing program. She is also Chief Financial Officer for a wholesale import company.

**

Anne Heide poetry has appeared in Shampoo, Coconut, Octopus and No Tell Motel, among others. Her reviews have appeared in Jacket, HOW2, First Intensity, Xantippe and Rain Taxi. She edits the journal CAB/NET out of Denver, where she is working towards a doctorate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

Going Postal: Rebecca Loudon's Radish King and Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home

Ravenna Press, 2006
No Tell Books, 2006

Reviewed by Caroline Ashby



Rebecca Loudon’s Radish King and Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home – her second book and first chapbook, respectively – both present themselves as collections of correspondence. In the case of Navigate, sender and recipient are clear: Earhart, our speaker, stranded after her Lockheed Elektra went down on or near Howland Island in 1937, has prepared letters and diary entries to friends and family whom she addresses in the poem titles, i.e. “To my Muriel, my doppelganger, my darling, my negative eye” and “To Miss Visser my one and only piano teacher.” (A glance at Earhart’s Wikipedia entry will unlock the mystery to most of the names.)

The poems of Radish King, however, sit inside the front and back of a postcard, but appear to be to and from the unknown. The characters that populate these poems are anonymous hes, shes, and yous that, in my reading – and the book lends itself to many – inhabit the speaker’s fiery and feverish dreams. They send the speaker poems chronicling the dream-memories to which they have been banished, simultaneously allowing and forcing her to piece together her journey through life. And what a brazen journey it’s been.

At first she remembers everything,
then starts slinging it off. The concierge
knows her name, all her lovers
in the same room, pare, paring, parings,


a pool on her pillow when she wakes,
pink or red or blue,
her sick sheets pulled down.

from Radish King’s “Bandaging Starla”

The poems of RK are sodden with hot-blooded sexual encounters, yet “pairings” is strikingly absent from the sequence in this passage, and this is telling. In RK, our speaker fails to connect on anything but a superficial, or bodily, level. Instead of holding fast to the memory of her beloveds, she has shucked them off, one by one. But they keep coming back to haunt her.

Earhart, on the other hand, summons those to whom she is emotionally tied, but is unable to connect physically since she is invisible to the world. She, therefore, is the ghost of Navigate. Consider one entry “From the missing diary:”

Virginia last night I dreamed you at twelve brushing my hair with the little yellow brush brushing brushing gathered my hair at my neck brushed underneath so carefully fifty strokes the handle warm in your hand my head in your lap I could smell you bristle I was bristle and clean fifty strokes to the side my pink ear exposed Ginny with strong hands you smelled of the forest my head full of electricity smelling you now my arms and legs and between my legs bristle with fur I am votre ours à fourrure my head in your lap your hands in my hair.

Earhart is begging and frenzied for contact. But the speaker of RK eschews the kind of nostalgia Earhart embraces, taking pains to writhe herself awake before those dream-memories are received.

In their solitude and delirium, the speakers of Loudon’s two works seem in conversation with one another. To her mother Earhart writes, “Dreamland and my own breath is gossip,” an isolation echoed in RK: “I’m alone in a body that doesn’t remember” (from “The dead-dog scent of lilacs on the last day in April”).

Loudon also allows the vocabulary of both speakers to overlap. In “flicker like a bluegirl under water,” from RK, the speaker says, “…she twisted each button/ on her sweater until it popped,” and Earhart writes, “All my buttons have twisted off.” While “chewing the leaves/ of a pepper tree my lips bleed,” Earhart writes to her sister, Pidge, and RK’s speaker “sing[s] the peppery tulips” in “Safeword.”

As a result of these conjunctions, the speakers (and books) begin to materialize for the reader as siblings under Loudon’s parentage. The speaker in RK is alone in her body, separate and distant from, yet terrorized by the phantoms of memory and imagination. To those back home, Earhart is the phantom, though her folks remain close in Earhart’s mind’s eye. The speakers are each a wing of the same plane, shooting off in opposite directions, but sharing Loudon’s backbone.


From Navigate’s “Where are you Fred?”


I want to tell you how bad it felt
falling and knowing
what a bad idea it was
to have decided against the parachutes

ha ha

I was a seed pod tumbling
thought I could flap my arms
shout your name and Snook’s
join hands
like synchronized swimmers

••••••••••••••••

From Radish King’s “Drinking Perchlorate on the Avenue of the Gods”

I’m sorry your plane went down.
I’m sorry you flailed and spilled your gin.

There is clotted cream on the table,
you are round and soft. You fell
you fell out of the sky.


Radish King and Navigate do indeed “join hands,” each book informing and intensifying a reading of the other. The books are best read in the evening before bed, when one’s own ghosts begin to be roused.


**

Rebecca Loudon is the author of three collections of poetry, including Tarantella (Ravenna Press). She is a violinist with Philharmonia Northwest Chamber Orchestra. She teaches violin to children. She has written the libretti for two choral pieces and a five part song cycle for orchestra and soprano.

**

Caroline Ashby is a graduate student in Library Science and former
private investigator, with a BA in Creative Writing from CUNY Hunter College. She's also an Assistant Editor for Tarpaulin Sky.