Poems are only made of words, but powerfully engaging poetry can transcend written language. Three new books by Vermont poets create verbal and emotional intensity on the page by very different means.
Kellam Ayres of Middlebury favors the pull of narrative, adapting techniques of prose fiction in poems that offer compressed, often erotically charged and suspenseful episodes tinged with violence and remorse. Calais poet Mary Elder Jacobsen's poems are resplendently aural, using sound to conjure a sensory universe on an intimate scale. And the poems of Alison Prine of Burlington swivel on the spindle of the present moment to look backward into memory and forward into a fleetingly imaginable future.
Ayres' narrative poems put a reader in the midst of a rural human community, which is a thickly forested landscape plentiful with animals. Enthralling but evasive men share the place she portrays with precisely evoked creatures, glimpsed alive or found as roadkill. She writes exactingly about snakes, a bedraggled goat, a bobcat, a deer that almost collided with a car and a run-over dog that did. Many of her most arresting poems describe the tight compass of clandestine lovers, where danger is close by.
In the Cathedral of My Undoing is Ayres' first book, completed with support from the Vermont Arts Council and Vermont Studio Center. She has degrees from the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English and the Warren Wilson College MFA program, and she works at the Middlebury College Library.
Her poems enact the dizzying gamble of being a body alongside other bodies — elation, then mixed feelings. The book's title comes from the end of a poem about a youthful encounter, thrilling but regrettable in retrospect: "I pedaled away / from the old mill, the first / cathedral of my undoing."
In a characteristically vibrant tracking shot, Ayres flicks drawn-out sentences through the cinematic frames of her verse:
Last together behind his wood shed,
making out against the worn shingles
until his girlfriend tracked us down, gripping
a pitchfork as if to run us out of some
old-timey town. We'd had it coming,
ever since the county fair—we met
at the dairy show, then rubbed against
each other in the oxen barn near those two-
thousand-pound beasts who crapped everywhere.
Ayres' book is divided into three parts, beginning with an omniscient view of small-town life — "phone sex between neighbors," angry couples fighting in the street below an apartment window, infidelities observed or embarked upon. The middle group of poems is a series of trancelike scenarios that are edgy and unsettling, particular in their details yet weird, as dreams can be: "I could walk into a wall and not notice, / I could walk into traffic — / still, I would call it pleasure."
The last part of the book elaborates on the theme of furtive, hypnotic physicality, but these poems seem less connected from one to the next. It's difficult to know whether the "I" in Ayres' third grouping is meant to portray a single narrator or a flexible (and fictional) persona, representing different people. (Could one person have had so many romantic misadventures?)
The reigning mood of Ayres' poems is elegiac — the poignancy of surviving rapture and ending up, as she writes, "No longer the same," and "no longer in love."
Here is a poet who revels in formal opportunities; she chooses or devises forms that don't constrain but channel the momentum of long, striding sentences. One of her poems is shaped like an hourglass, and many have subtle rhyme schemes. "Diptych: Boathouse in Autumn Rain" is bidirectional, like a palindrome, reaching a midpoint and then turning back on itself all the way to the beginning, with each line repeated in reverse order.
In this segment of her poem "Beekeeping"; listen for the sonorous zzz sounds:
Once, we kept bees, in hives—
or, they kept us, kept us mesmerized,
kept us drunk on dandelions,
dazed and dizzy by roadsides,
kept us spellbound in fields
dusted by pollen, all abuzz,
Her conviviality with the sounds of words complements a warm domesticity in imagery. For instance, "Sponge Bath" is a doubled lullaby, a two-part poem that uses almost the same words twice. The first part is addressed to an infant; the second, to an elderly parent.
She's entirely at home among brooms and snow shovels, or counting buttons for a kindergartner's homework assignment. Through refrain and repetition, Jacobsen revels in the dailiness of tasks that are deliciously ordinary.
The title of Prine's second poetry collection has a tender erudition, with its suggestion that the contents might offer an alternative to sorrow. But as in her first book, Steel, a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award, many of her new poems hearken back to calamitous losses: a mother's death in a car accident that the poems' narrator survived, and the death by suicide of a sibling.
What could be the opposite of losses so severe? One answer is a certain kind of abundance, which Prine summons not extravagantly or elaborately but with lines that give off a quietly evanescent glow.
A clinical social worker by day, Prine was one of five Vermont poets featured this summer in Vermont Humanities' "Words in the Woods" series. Seven Days reviewer Rachel Elizabeth Jones wrote of Prine's previous book that it is "nearly too forceful to read in one sitting," but the poems in Loss and Its Antonym glide from one piece to the next so absorbingly that this reader couldn't resist their flow.
Individual poems, strong as they are, seem inseparable from the whole sweep. And the writing moves in swift gestures, springing like a relay across the white space:
a match dropped on the prairie
a sparrow's claw print in the dirtjust enough water to sip
from two cupped handsa small shadow when the sun
begins to howl
With spare but reverberating lines, Prine shows how individual instants can be gathered to render a wide swath of awareness. In a lyric poem, time can leap or pause, as in this passage from "Pick Any Hour":
I can say in that moment
or any moment
I love your hands
moving the air as you speak
your hands are a river, a ropedays and days and days
slip off behind us
glasses broken in the sink
bulbs burned, soles
of our shoes worn thin
our shovel's rusted bladeyour voice reading aloud
the words gone, the book
but not your hands
We're so often told to look forward with hope, but the future may be a realm of lasting grief, as well: "I have only / known tomorrow / for what will not be there," as Prine writes in "Harbor." Her new book refuses frail consolation, and she knows when to bring a poem to a close, or a pause — assured in what will be enough.