by Sandra Kohler
Word Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
The collection's first poems deal with family:
intergenerational loss and estrangement and the tension between
siblings who are now without the parents who once bonded them.
Sisters spar with and comfort each other in turn and a brother
wonders whether he can save another from years of steady, incremental
self-destruction.
In the final stanza of the collection's opening poem,
“From the Albums of Strangers,” Kohler writes: “The dead cannot
be/ robbed, the living touched; home is the place/ you can't get from
here, your body the naked/ fact that cannot be hidden. The loved
traveler/ who returns cannot be embraced, only held/ at arms' length
and gazed into, a mirror,/ impenetrable, remote, impossibly close.”
In “The Age of Departures,” the narrator observes:
“Once we thought each farewell the end/ of a world. Each is; worlds
end every day./ The unthinkable is the natural: we learn this/ as we
did our first language, slowly,/ unconsciously, resisting,
disbelieving.”
Personal mortality is confronted in “White”: “...
For days now, a recurrent pulsing in/ my diaphragm nags, aches, sets
me to imagining/ fatality; this morning I realize why it's familiar:/
a fetus' quickening. The omens of life and death/ are twins: the
threat of death, the promise of life;/ the threat of life, the
promise of death.”
In “Transitions,” Kohler lightens the tone by
indulging in some nimble language play, while remaining
philosophical:
The
first day of hunting season: I come to
the
gray window and bring my gray landscape
to
bear on this one. Bear is not what they're hunting
but
buck. The heart is at bay, the heart astray in the
deepest
woods, lost. I am going to the river, I'll
walk
till the day is found again. That will
happen
when my eyes permit it.
Later in the poem, she simply states, “I pick up my
gun, my life.”
The poems in the collection's second section are
centered around the appearance of a heron, dubbed Heraclitus, at the
same river (but is it the same heron?) The Heraclitus poems are
leaner and more impressionistic than the bulk of those in the
collection, but with Kohler, it's often the meatier poems that pack
more punch.
In those grouped together in the third section,
“Writing the Wound,” the personal and political converge in
moments of urgency.
In a poem about the outbreak of war in Bosnia, Kohler
muses: “We are only what we can bear to resent./ Does any of us
star in anything other/ than the dark dream of the soul, its/
betrayal, its secret history of irrevocable loss...”
In a later poem she observes, “Rain and sleep and
bombs. Yesterday we bombed Iraq./ Blotches of cloud over hills, to
the north vanishing into/ fog, to the south, thickening to slate. A
small gray-haired/ woman walks up the path as she does every
morning./ Wind rises in the bare twigs of the mulberry...”
In “Heraclitus in Eastern Europe,” Kohler describes
a grim sort of “human nature preserve”:
Our
century's mapped in the forests,
rivers
of Eastern Europe: rail lines stitched like
a
wound leading to the Polish camps, mines
studding
Bosnian wetlands, unmarked bones
beneath
Balkan soil. It's our nature preserved
here:
wars and their aftermath embedded in
the
landscape, imploding at a touch, a step.
In “Borderlands,” she gazes unblinkingly at the
full horror of war, the personal devastation that is forced on the
uninvolved, a mother from a nonpolitical family who “never threw a
stone.”
…the
head of my son
was
on one of the greenhouses...
four
hundred meters away,
the
head of my son. And I
kissed
it,....I saw a hand
in
one of the trees, and
I
kissed the fingers.”
Kohler ends “Reading the Hebrew Scriptures” with
“... None of our models of what life/ can be mirrors its intricate
living machinery,/ answers its raw cry.”
The poems in the final section return to the realm of
the personal.
In “September Song,” the tone is somber: “... The
garden's// become a scrim, a facade, something essential lost: we//
stay in the garden but Eden walks out, leaving it....”
The collection takes its title from lines in “Maybe
Sibelius”: “In the dream we are dancing,/ while making love, to
improbable music, maybe/ Sibelius....”
The narrator has absentmindedly put words to this scrap
of dream-music, the Beatles' “I've got to get you into my life.”
She's unsure what the words signify. She bickers with her husband. He
says she's obsessed with the garden.
The poem ends: “The rain/ is a sudden burst, deluge.
You are what I have/ to get into my life. You are what I have. What/
if, hurtling through these storms, we forget to/ touch, to make the
gesture that will heal us?”
In each of these poems, there is a chance of healing,
of connection, a question that is raised like “the interrogative
curve” that Heraclitus makes “in the scratched geometry of
reeds...” Sometimes the chance is embraced.
These are poems that look deeply into the heart of
matters and often emerge with not answers but solace in what can at
least be shared.
“September Song” closes: “Pour me a small cup//
of the wine we were drinking the night you first realized/ my
laughter would be the last sound that warmed you,// the night I saw
lights flicker at the end of my vision,/ and knew loving you was the
mirage I'd subsist on.”
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