~LESLEY WHEELER~
BEAUTIFUL
AS MY KNEES DISSOLVE: SUSAN
SETTLEMYRE WILLIAMS'S ASHES IN MIDAIR
. . . the poems in Ashes in Midair
are full of risk—formal
and psychological. When Williams weaves
references
to fairy tales, tarot cards, and Bible stories into poems
with contemporary elements, the results are resonant.
Some poetry collections build parallel
realities that are as engrossing as the alternate worlds created by
great novels. While a book of poems must refract the other world in
briefer glimpses than prose fiction provides, poetry’s universes can
therefore be even more fantastic and alluring. For example,
contemporary poets Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill depict incursions into the familiar world by
water horses and other half-animal beings. Janet McAdams blends science
and history, giving her poems an apocalyptic edge, like some
speculative fiction. Karin Gottshall’s work is haunted by ghosts and
fables and tales of metamorphosis. Likewise, in Ashes in Midair, selected by Yusef
Komunyakaa for the Poetry Book Prize from Many Mountains Moving Press,
Susan Settlemyre Williams opens little windows into a distinctly gothic
landscape in which danger is exquisitely lovely and “the face of God is
never a human face.”
Williams divides Ashes
in Midair into four sections concerned, in sequence, with
adolescence, work, death, and the afterlife. The last sequence is the
most beautiful. It begins with “Driving West on the Interstate in a
Monsoon,” in which an apparition from the past, a “dark angel” of a
boy, seems to scale the bank of the road behind the speaker. Williams
manages such visitations deftly. They are emotionally potent enough
that some uncertainty over their materiality and meaning only heightens
the poem’s intensity. “Dementia Diary,” in contrast, progresses in
horror with a kind of documentary realism: this poem recounts in
excruciating detail the “afterlife” of an elderly mother who has lost
her ability to function in the ordinary world. There is even an epic
trip to the “Underworld” involving an imprisoned father, an escape
tunnel, and a lucky coincidence. The details of these scenes are
distinctly southern—mine cave-ins and sinkholes, loblolly pines and
hoodoo—but they also occur in the no-place, no-time of dreams and
folktales.
The poems that explicitly revise myth are,
surprisingly, some of the least successful. The first poem in the
collection, for instance, “Codes for Hunger,” takes on a series of
Grimm’s characters in what feels like an exercise, although beautifully
rendered. Williams uses a constant scaffolding of epigraphs, too, that
involves too much borrowed authority, cluttering some poems with the
eggshells of their origins. Otherwise, however, the poems in Ashes in Midair are full of
risk—formal and psychological. When Williams weaves references to fairy
tales, tarot cards, and Bible stories into poems with contemporary
elements, the results are resonant. For instance, Bluebeard crops up
amid a mother’s ordinary warnings in “About Glass,” reminding us that
behind every scrap of adult advice lies a dire threat of violence.
Worlds also jostle roughly together in “The Saints of April”:
If April is an open door, the Pope
has just passed through, and it’s
about to slam
behind my mother-in-law.
Sacred mysteries can be celebrated with plastic eggs, and Williams
captures this kind of startling clash in lyric poems that range through
diverse voices and frames of reference. The panicky energy of “Woman
Burying Something” and “Boy Pursued” are, likewise, wonderfully uncanny.
Williams’s concerns with suffering, beauty, and the
incredible weirdness of human existence climax in Part Two. This
tightly-interwoven sequence explores the idea of artistic calling
through the figure of “Kathryn,” a North Carolinian woman born around
1930, who, taking instructions from an angel, makes art out of bones,
beads, yarn, and tempera paint. This endeavor does not turn out well
for the title character, whose life is brutal and who dies in exile
from her homestead, her ornamented skulls floating up in a cellar flood:
Bobbing on the brown waves like
buoys, like
someone’s bread cast on the
waters, painted
and jeweled, the godlike heads,
their empty gaze.
All that assonance and consonance is pretty, but constitutes slim
consolation when one has been disappointed by false prophecy. Making
things—sculpture, poems— is ultimately an optimistic response to
suffering. This very addiction to world-building makes some art seem
preferable to life.
In the poetic universe that Williams creates, being
haunted can be a profound and empowering experience. Even her darkest
poems brim with kindness: they favor connection and meaning over
alienation. As she writes in “Dealing with Beauty,” describing waking
to see the fangs of a gorgeous spider by her head, we mostly behave
like cowards when divinity gets too close: “I think beautiful as my knees dissolve, / elegant, a blow to the chest.” We
kill our visionary experiences, and then elegize them. These poems
persuade us, nonetheless, that belated, even fictive, love is better
than simply burying our skeletons.
Ashes in Midair,
Susan Settlemyre Williams. Many Mountains Moving Press, 2008. ISBN:
9781886976221 $15.95
© by Lesley Wheeler
|
