~GRAY JACOBIK~
ANN SILSBEE: ORIOLING
. . . no one reading this collection would be tempted to
hurry
through these meditations sprinkled with a few dramatic
monologues.
Most are quietly understated, turning on moments of private
ritual,
observation, and memory, yet each calls attention to its
subject
through brilliant intellection, and to its making
through the requirements of achieved art.
Orioling, Ann Silsbee's first
collection,
was published in 2003 by Red Hen Press. It received their 2001
Benjamin
Saltman Poetry Award. Because the poems in Orioling are
so
caredully wrought — the sonic devices resonate intricately, the images
radiate — reading has us adjust ourselves to the states-of-being
required
for their composition, or so I imagine, for the lyric speaker we
encounter
presents herself as someone who has stilled her mind and opened her
heart,
trained her eye and her ear, found, amid a tragic sense of life, true
notes
of celebration.
I read Orioling first shortly after
it was released in August 2003, the month Ann Silsbee died. Often
I think of the opening lines of a poem by Emily Dickinson, "Death sets
a Thing significant / The Eye had hurried by " . . . although no one
reading
this collection would be tempted to hurry through these meditations
sprinkled
with a few dramatic monologues. Most are quietly understated,
turning
on moments of private ritual, observation, and memory, yet each calls
attention
to its subject through brilliant intellection, and to its making
through
the requirements of achieved art.
At times in a Silsbee poem we find wordplay,
experimental punctuation, elision and, on occasion, a tough satiric
edge.
This last is true in "Cruising the September Fields." The title
suggests
a contemporary pastoral — instead we are presented with a neighbor "who
can't walk anymore," who chews up hills with an earthmover the poet
sees
as a "chugging stegosaurus" that "crushes seedlings in the dirt, /
leaves
his toeprint chain bleeding green." Written in quatrains, the
first
presents an example of Silsbee's musical allusions as well as her
control
of cadence and rhythm:
My
neighbor names
his earthmover
Heavy
Metal.
It's his mount, his strum,
his beat, his
key of drums, his hymn.
Every day, he
rides its time.
Notice, among several other effects, that of alliterating as
well as
consonating on the letter "m." Most obvious, of course, is the
repetition
of "his," combined with additional echoes in "Heavy," "hymn," and "he,"
and the assonance on "a" and "u." This kind of careful working
can
be found throughout the poems in this collection. Silsbee studied
at Cornell with A.R. Ammons. They 
share
affinities in their vision of how the processes in the natural world
map
isomorphically onto human emotion and thought, but it is here, in this
attention to the intricate play of sound, to the larger rhythms of
subject
in relation to structure, that I locate Ammons' influence most clearly.
Poems of memory are lifted beyond the personal
and the quotidian through repetition and elegant phrasing. I've
long
had a preference for poets who trouble the surface of their poems, who
eschew the American plain style. In Silsbee's work there's
something
more Irish or Welsh that emerges: the intricate play of closely clotted
consonants, the chiming and echoing of a guttural "k" (for example)
moved
from initial to medial to final position within words of close
proximity.
Ann Silsbee, a classical pianist and composer
as well as a poet, takes surface play — the deft and frequent use of
sound
devices, including syntactical variations, simple repetitions and rhyme
— about as far as one can imagine doing while retaining
coherence.
At times there is such a tinkling effect, I begin to hear a
harpsichord,
at other times the sounds are deeply mournful, and I am put in mind of
oboe or cello. It's obvious, knowing Silsbee's other art, to
think
this way, and such impressions are supported throughout her work by
numerous
allusions to instruments, sounds, composers, musical notation and so
on.
A lover and astute observer of husband,
children,
parents, sister and brother, of the natural world, its weathers,
seasons,
creatures, Silsbee is a sensualist and a quiet ecstatic, praiseful yet
not without an undertone of sorrow. Sometimes figured as
"drought"
or "a cold north wind," and encoded in dirge or fugue-like sounds,
darker
moments play counterpoint to praise and songs of release and joy.
This is clear in a poem such as "Old Willa Speaks Out," in which the
persona
claims she keeps a "small stone wedged" in her shoulder that "speaks /
its own stony language, a tongue / whose words you learn not to say."
Silsbee's particular genius is most apparent
in short lyrics, especially those in which the speaker's subjectivity
merges
with the sensuous reality she is experiencing, when the boundaries
between
outer and inner landscape are most porous. "Moult" is such a
poem,
and this one, as is true of three or four others in this collection,
has
no punctuation other than initial capitalization and cadence is
modulated
with white space:
Moult
Under
some June
suns you want to be alone
the weight of
light almost too bright to bear
You shed some
clothes to breathe and shoes
and step out
of day into dusk Around you
woods
unfold
Trees slide by The silk of dark
slips its skin
inside yours from soles to scalp
All your pores
flare wide freeing fine hairs
along your arms
and the back of your neck
to lift toward
the slightest shift of air
Caterpillars
munch softly in the leaves
overhead
and a nearby owl drops
rounded stones
in the still pond of your mind
opening out
rings to the farthest rim
returns to you
as if a deep low gong
were
rung
the love-song of bullfrogs
down in the
mud among roots of water-iris
thrumming on
and on like your whole heart
So typical of Silsbee to assonate on the inaugural vowel,
"u" ("under,"
"June," "suns"), then turn to consonance with "weight," "light," and
"bright"
in the next line. As the speaker moves through the landscape,
shedding
clothes and shoes, the "woods unfold," the "Trees slide by."
Speaker
and reader have entered the meditative realm of a walker who dissolves
the frame of the body's bounds: "The silk of dark / slips its skin
inside
yours." When "a nearby owl drops / rounded stones in the still
pond
of your mind," the union of outside and inside is complete, a motion
reinforced
by the "thrumming" of the bullfrogs that goes "on and on" as the human
heart beats. Here in "Moult," as in so many of the poems in Orioling,
we have the deepest kind of personal meditative lyric, one that
celebrates
the richness of a human sensibility in sympathetic union with the
natural
world. This is the Romantic Sublime written in the manner of the
moment, and Silsbee is in the tradition of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and
their
heir, Ammons. Her work speaks strikingly to a late Romantic
worldview
that nonetheless sees, and is appalled by, the less-than-romantic
destruction
of the natural world, and of the artifacts of human creation.
(One
poem commemorates the Taliban's destruction of the Buddha At Bamiyan.)
In our cynical age, love poems written without
a note of irony or disparagement, are not always appreciated, even when
they are done well. In "You Touch My Face" the speaker addresses
a lover who has returned after a long journey during which time the
speaker
has experienced "all that has happened here, the children / the
scorched
house . . . ." Here are the concluding stanzas:
Later, when we
lie together in the dark,
your palms find
the cavity in my cheeks,
feather my dry
eyelashes with threads
of south wind,
climb my shoulder-crags,
the outcrops
of my ribs. Around us rain
sheets the
eaves—through
its noise we hear
brook
roaring
over rocks in the garden.
Underground
waters run through me,
your hands like
roots in my grief,
reaching into
the widening cracks,
the pores of
earth where growing things
catch hold again
and push for light.
These lines illustrate what I mean
by Silsbee's
understated quality. The metaphors of the physical world for the
human body are common enough, although rendered with originality.
The beloved's breath "feather[s] my dry eyelashes with threads / of
south
wind," the brook heard "roaring over rocks in the garden" moves into
the
speaker's body to become "underground waters [that] run through
me."
The lover's touch becomes "like roots" that reach into the "widening
cracks"
of the speaker's grief, then the poem concludes with the generative
imagery
of "growing things" that "push for light." In a lesser poet, more
would have been made of the anguish suffered during the lover's
absence.
Here all that emotion is stated in the negative, "as if all that has
happened
. . . / . . . were not choked in my throat."
Reading Silsbee, say for fifteen or twenty
minutes at a stretch, I find myself smiling, aflood with memories, more
peaceful, centered, joyful. Yes, that is it. Joy comes
forth,
and as I turn the page from poem to poem, my thought is the same, "I
want
to come back to that one," for this is work that rewards the reader by
fully occupying the mind and resonating through the body. At the
same time a vision is conveyed as Silsbee's sensibility reveals itself
across a number of poems. Readers with unhurried eyes will
realize
that here is a poet who achieved the balance of staying vibrant,
sensitive,
and realistically attuned to both the creative and destructive forces
operating
in our culture, while, at the same time, mastering the art required to
represent her experience thoroughly, delicately, beautifully.
Silsbee, Ann. Orioling.
Los Angeles, California: Red Hen Press,
2003. ISBN: 1-888996-61-7 $13.95
© by Gray Jacobik
