Buying a new
poetry collection is like investing in a travel ticket—the excitement begins
when a book arrives with shiny cover and unexplored pages; the cover art of Angles of Separation is Edvard Munch’s
oil painting, “Separation” from the
Munch Museum in New York. There is an epigraph from Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia about separation; a dedication;
acknowledgments. There isn’t a foreword or preface and the fifty poems are
divided into four parts with a page of Notes at the end, followed by an About
the Author page, and a page of titles by the poet. I avoid the back cover,
blurbs, author page, until writing the
review.
There is great
energy in Skillman’s work, cosmic power as in “A Sliver of Heat”: “At night the
earth collided with comet hair/ and you wanted to tip the Milky Way/ into your
parched throat.” In the 3 page poem, “Thrum and Goad” are the lines “I hunger
for what is true” and yet the last stanza begins “I yearn for the cessation of
wing beats.”
Some of
Skillman’s work reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s meditative darkness of modern life,
his examination of time and meaning such as in her short narrative poem where
emptiness is echoed in the last line: “But when I return to the kitchen,
nothing lives there, nothing fills the saucepans fitted like Russian dolls one
inside the other inside the other.” This search for meaning is repeated in
“Cause and Effect” where things mock, cruelty thrives and there is a pattern of
violence to those who listen, those who want to hear and have enough courage.
This is a poet
who bravely addresses the brevity of life and is a close observer of nature
from animals, birds, trees, the water lily, grasshoppers, and the wind. This
American poet’s sweep is wide: from shingles on skin, eating tongue, bluebells,
starlings sitting on wires, seasonal affective disorder, Shakespeare’s characters—and
her look is clear, economical, without sentimentality or illusion. And yet she
also notes that the world has too much beauty to be understood.
I would have
liked more on the back Notes page to explain words such as Kore, the Judas
tree, Macabee trap, geodes, and the passages in French; giving the four parts
names would have been helpful to me as a reader. I’m looking forward to her
next collection—the travel time with Angles
of Separation, seeing her landscape, was a memorable trip.
The most recent
books of this multi-award recipient are: The
Phoenix: New & Selected Poems 2007-2013 (Dream Horse Press, 2014); Broken Lines—The Art and Craft of Poetry
(Lummox Press, 2013). Some of the poems in this collection have appeared in: Prairie Schooner; The Aurorean; Athenaeum:
Best Indie Verse of New England.
___
Carol Smallwood’s recent books include Water, Earth, Air, Fire, and Picket Fences (Lamar University
Press, 2014) and Writing After Retirement
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Carol has founded, supports humane societies.
