Ann Fisher-Wirth: Review by Ann Hostetler
Ann Fisher-Wirth, Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books)
Paradise is Jagged, Ann Fisher-Worth’s seventh collection of poems, celebrates the epiphanies that arise from the discord of living—the only paradise we know.
For Fisher-Wirth, Paradise does not exist in a separate realm apart from daily life; it is with us, now, in the realm of the senses, in the mutable world. Jagged-ness hurts, cuts, pricks. These painful qualities jar us into an awareness of presence. To read this book is to embark on a lyric pilgrimage through a series of meditations on the sites of painful encounter, salvaging the beauty that shines there.
The book’s cover painting, by the poet’s late mother, of an autumnal garden in the throes of decay, sets the tone for this book of mourning and presence. The elegies range from intimate and personal to communal and global: for the author’s mother, father, sister, stillborn daughter; for the lives meted out in Parchman Prison; for her beloved teacher Thich Nhat Hanh; for the fleeting nature of time; for the natural world where we find ourselves amidst the compost of dying and living. Throughout the collection, Fisher-Wirth’s poems are steeped in her intimate knowledge of ecosystems and inter-relatedness of the human and natural worlds.
As she describes it in “Winter Days on the Whirlpool Trails”:
Everywhere rotting, everywhere teeming,
moss like emeralds on the stumps
and hollow logs. This is my home, this leaf duff
and dereliction, where a vulture wheels
above the cedars, searching for what stinks. (33)
The five parts of the collection reflect stages, or passages in the meditative journey. The epigraph poem, “A Young Stag at Dusk,” offers a memoir moment of the young poet, age three, looking out of the car window, exclaiming “there’s so much to see.” Invoking this marker of time, the poet suggests that there is still so much to see before we enter “this great silence” from which the stag emerges and then disappears.
Each of the five sections of the book has a distinct focus, but their themes and characters intermingle. The first section delves into ancestry, inheritance, family and childhood, beginning with an homage to a female forbearer, “Imagining Caroline Casper, Nebraska 1880,” and ending with “Namesake,” an elegy to both the poet’s recently deceased sister Jennifer, and her namesake, the poet’s stillborn child. With an interplay between lyric and narrative modes, section one intersperses forms borrowed from Asian literary sources, such as the Zuihitszu, with free verse and stanza-ordered poems, creating a collage of approaches to intimate subject matter.
Section Two shifts its focus to the world around us, offering meditations on objects and scenes that reflect human interactions with the environment. Beginning with an intricately observed ekphrastic poem prompted by a postcard, this section introduces us to the landscape of the poet’s Mississippi and culminates in a poem that ponders the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which is also an homage to Lucille Clifton.
Section Three, “The Astonishing Light,” is an extended exploration of racial justice, responsibility, and relationships, based on the poet’s experience of co-teaching a creative writing class to inmates at Parchman Prison in Mississippi.
Section Four includes poems about travel and teaching, as the poet both learns from and teaches others in settings from Northern California to Costa Rica. The section also encompasses a series of letter poems to Jennifer, and the remarkable “Thum,” an elegy that unpacks a shared childhood memory, merging the bitter taste of the liquid painted on the two sisters’ thumbs with the bitterness of loss.
Section Five returns to the themes of loss and rebirth, including the title poem, “Paradise is Jagged,” concluding with an elegy to the great teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. These poems honor the transformative love that breaks open our hearts and enables us to find the jagged paradise wherever we live. The title poem is a reverse acrostic, the first line beginning with the last letter of the alphabet, a fitting form for an energetic poem—and collection—that explores the interconnection of all things.
Zing!
You’re alive, aren’t you?
X-rays show nothing wrong,
why fight against this happiness?
–violets clustering between the bricks on the front walk,
under the pecan trees, spider lilies intricate and scarlet,
Theo the tuxedo cat lapping cream on the porch. (90)
I read this poem numerous times before recognizing its form. The poet’s voice is so compelling and her images so specific that the pressure of reverse alphabetical order was hidden from me. My own favorite poem in this section is “Pecans,” an homage to the poet’s home in Oxford, Mississippi next to just such a tree—likely the same one that appears in “Jagged Paradise.”
[H]undreds of pecans stand out tawny against
the mud, fallen leaves, matted grass,
and I can’t stop drifting around the yard,
stuffing them in my pockets,
the poet writes of the “gift / November offers in Mississippi after a freeze.” The nuts may or may not be edible, the tree may even fall in a storm, but for now it is a source of plenty.
… We exist by grace
or chance in the free fall of every moment,
but for now, my life is full of sweetness, pecans
like little brains tucked in their bitter shells. (81)
At such imagistic moments in Fisher-Wirth’s poems—the pecans as little brains—the lyric dances with the narrative, the tree becomes a symbol of reciprocity as the human imagination seizes on what is there to delineate our hopes and search for meaning. “High in the branches, a few remaining / husks hang, open, dark, like agitated stars.”
Paradise is Jagged is a work of mature vision and an irrepressible zest for life, that urges us to pay attention to all there is to see around on this earth. It’s a book for the bedside table or the backpack, to be savored and enjoyed over and over again.
Ann Hostetler is the author of two collections of poetry, Safehold (2018) and Empty Room with Light (2002), and the editor of A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry (2003). Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Poet Lore, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Hostetler is professor of English Emerita at Goshen College in Goshen, IN where she taught literature and creative writing for 22 years. She edits the Journal of Mennonite Writing.