Six weeks ago I wrote about this book. While my review was complimentary I felt encouraged to have another stab at reviewing it because of the efforts of its creators to find an audience. I wanted to continue the conversation.
The thing I took away from these poems the first time reading was the author’s sense of awe, and I realise upon rereading that part of that appreciation is linked to the talent evident in them. Mussro is alive to the magic of the passing moment but she also has in her the ability to capture those fleeting perceptions, those stray ideas that gravitate to the periphery of consciousness as time expands and as we come closer to the limit of mortality. Here you are present at the birth of a lamb, you watch swallows flicker across the field of your vision, you open a jar to smell the herbs inside, you share in the moment.
As soon as you’ve finished reading a line and have understood its meaning – as soon as you’ve made this fragile truce so that you’re subtly changed – another verse appears to distract you. Here’s the boon of literature. A line as simple as “Spring in the hills can go to your head” transports the reader to a place perhaps seen from the driving seat of a car on a trip taken long before on the South Coast even though if you read the introduction you’ll know that you’re actually an ocean away on a different continent. But then you read, “Dense green shoots fill the animals’ mouths” – and so you realise you’re on a farm, perhaps in a barn or outside on a slope.
“Raw heat floods the days with queer energy”: here, now, you’re under the sun on a slope with the scent of grass surrounding you with its calm miasma and for a moment you find yourself inside someone else’s skin. But Mussro challenges you with her blinking notions of the poetic. What constitutes the energy she names in this way? What particular sense of “queer” is she using here? Is it in terms that people on social media might understand? Is it a politicised meaning she’s reaching for as she asks us to accompany her along the hillside? We’re on a farm, remember, not on a protest march in a city street (where the use of this word might take us in the imagination). The layers pile up and are swept away by the brooms of Mussro’s words – cleaning out the barn.
Fragments come together and are separated by novelty as the author parts the curtains on the page which, like a stage, presents a scene with actors (“queer energy”, “new lambs”, “fearsome songs”, “a frail, perfect hand”) and we ask: what is being shown to me here? Is this something that has happened to me, or is it a play of words revealing something new? The imagery sticks and falls away as the signification slides across the front of your mind, one word bringing with it sensations of thought to crash against others that enter from stage left, speaking their own lines. One image strung like a pearl on the narrative cord beside another one that (sort of) matches, but also that turns away to point out in a different direction, signalling – what?
In ‘Mary of Bethany’ we visit a house. “My mother, grandmother, aunts / saved for years / bargained and harassed a dozen merchants / for this fragrance” – we have a solid image, a smell (something that, in ‘He is in the Field’, was “a new-lamb scent”) – but certainty fractures with the vagaries of thought. As it does in real life; we range like livestock over the foothills of understanding, smelling the grass that sustains us but always distant from the enlightenment that daylight suggests should eventually come, given enough time. In the poem the domestic arrangement encompasses romance, love, marriage, all of the classical tropes of contentment. Surely the reader can understand what Mussro is talking about.
But here memories find their own level and the field of understanding is barely common ground. The beauty of these verses is in their ability to draw the reader to a point where it appears that everything will be uncovered – the identity of “him” in ‘Mary of Bethany’, the identity of “he” in ‘He is in the field’ – but then, with the flick of a swift’s tail as it careens across the field of wiew, fast as the blink of an eye, you’re confronted with a puzzle.
In ‘The Swifts’, a short poem of just 42 words, you’re apparently on more stable ground. Fewer questions to answer here, you’d think. Here you can see the birds flying, perhaps hear the call of a crow in a tree, but the imagery is complex and satisfying, the author digging up secondary ideas (“a cyclone”, “like children they return”) to tempt the reader and draw in different vectors of meaning on which to carry the weight of the world. I think the crux of this poem is in the words “hunger and glee” that appear in the middle, like a hinge upon which the entire construct opens, insisting on a shared sense of destiny. What have such seasonal birds got to do with me?
In ‘Hearing an Interview with Matthew Sanford’ a possible answer is suggested: “the body responds with strategies / for new beginnings, / reaching toward what is alive” – a simple response to a question the reader might want to put to Mussro. What is it that I’m reading? Is this something you’ve thought, or is it me speaking? And I was reminded of these poems while watching a video a friend who is a photographer made to describe her art.
I watched the video just after writing about the poems. It is about colour and at one point Basia Sokolowska talks about Anselm Adams and his black-and-white photographs using different tones to create meaning and to communicate with the viewer. Colour is like the imagery in Mussro’s poetry, it might be bright or it might be subtle but, like the words she uses, it carries a burden of meaning independent of the artwork being experienced. This is the realm in which the reader – or the viewer – finds him- or herself before the artwork, in a place of understanding and of revelation. For Sokolowska it might be a mild mid-blue or a sharp, saturated red, for Mussro it might be a word (“new”, “alive”).
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