WHEN OUR WORLD WAS WHOLE, Elizabeth Weir. Kelsay
Books, American Fork, Utah, 2022, 87 pages, $20, paperback. www.kelsaybooks.com
Elizabeth Weir’s second poetry
collection, When Our World Was Whole, holds to a theme of connection—in
subject matter, call and response relationships between poems, and prosodic
devices within them. Divisions are not indicated in the table of contents, but
there are three distinct, yet inter-related, sections. In the first (roughly
half of the book), poems are connected by the frequent topic of family. A
supportive mother tends to her daughter’s physical and emotional needs through
influenza (“On string legs, … / Mother supporting my elbow, / I stepped through
our French windows / into an English spring garden”); through doubts about
remaining in nursing school (Mother and I sit on the garden step / as I tell of
my new life as a student nurse / of bottom-warm bedpans, soiled sheets, /
lifting and turning heavy patients, / learning to hold kidney dishes to catch /
vomit and not to retch, myself—” and through emigrating from England to
Minnesota. A less empathetic and more distant father adds a practical (“Vegetables,
my dad swore, would see us / through the thin years, post war…”), yet quirky
side to the family (“I was thirteen and falling out of love with my dad. / He
was unlike other fathers, with his teakwood / cigarette holder and fresh rose
buttonhole. / I worried what my friends would think / of his large ears and
habit of humming….” A brother enters and slips away, both in this section and in
life. An entire family with beauty marks and warts, connected by substance, makes its appearance, and then this one person comes along that
changes life forever...
The Fabric of Family
I
wouldn’t have called it burlap—
not
exactly. No. It was more
common
cotton, thin thread,
A
bit worn, but comfortable.
By chance, silk
happened along.
Charming,
yes, a cocoon to love
and
new well-being but, oh,
the
effort to keep it pressed.
If
you are cotton, true to your core,
can
you ever do more than
slip
on filmy silk, assume
your place with learned grace?
The
connection articulated in these poems is enacted by repetitious diction,
musicality, and poem placement. For example, the opening poem, “Early in
Nonsuch Park,” images
whiteness in each of its two stanzas, and sets up the next two poems that
include “Nonsuch” as well. The “fat white fingers” of “Awakening” echoes the
whiteness of the first, and “Mum” in the third poem sets up the mother in the
fourth poem, “A Distant Day in April” (“Mother feared that the coal man / might
deliver us one sack short”) which connects with the fifth (the mother supporting
the daughter’s elbow). The father introduced in this latter poem “puff[ing] his
Players Navy Cut,” appears in the next poem (a Petrarchan Sonnet”) in the
sestet, making the turn with
I was
thirteen and falling out of love with my dad.
He was
unlike other fathers, with his teakwood
cigarette
holder and fresh rose buttonhole.
I worried
what my friends would think
of his
large ears and habit of humming, but still
I loved the sweetness in his mashed parsnips.
And so it goes, poem after poem, one poem introducing an image, a family member, a relationship, and the next poem embellishing or amplifying it, riffing on the idea of connection with concrete, specific images, actions, or characters. That enactment of abstract ideas with specificity is one of the strengths of this poetry collection, as evidenced in the penultimate poem in section I, “Improbable.”
Improbable that I should pass
by
at the moment
a
dragonfly alights on
the wing
of a dragonfly sculpture,
a lone
piece of art, planted
in a Minnesota prairie.
Improbably
that I should be here,
in distant
Minnesota, with you,
that you should
have come, uninvited,
to a
Polish party in South Africa,
that we
should have met,
you from
Ireland, me from England.
Improbable
that I should happen to land
on the
apex of your cardiologist heart
that
long-ago night, that we are here,
contented,
far from our origins
among
summer prairies, sun-glanced
wings,
unlikely sculptures.
The
epigraph for section two points the reader toward the tension between male and
female that has both propelled the species forward, and threatens to be its
undoing. Patriarchy is like / the elephant in the room. / How can it not /
affect life when it’s / the superstructure / of human society? —Ani
DiFranco, songwriter and singer. A cursory reading of these poems can miss the
connection between content and structure and how the forms of these poems
support their individual messages and the interplay between them. “New Orleans
Bronze” and “Apple Honored Eve,” for example, although ten pages apart, call
and answer to one another both in ideation and structure.
In the opening ekphrastic poem,
three stanzas with a decreasing number of lines (quintain, quatrain, tercet), paint
the picture of a three-tiered statue of colonialist Jean Baptist le Moyne de
Bienville, a priest, and a Chickasaw chief, “features finely cut, deep-set eyes
down-cast, / his people’s peace pipe empty in his hand,” commemorating the
founding of New Orleans. The descending number of lines enact the artificial
hierarchy of state and religion lorded above a conquered people, now diminished
in number and position. The message and form of this poem are contrasted with
“Apple Honored Eve” exalting the tale of blaming the first woman for eating the
forbidden fruit, when in fact that act “…gave us / the ability to analyze and
deduce, / to grow in thought and to manage / the world for our species’
advantage.” The form chosen to contain this message is the reverse of the
cascade of diminishing stanzas in “New Orleans Bronze”—these three stanzas
increase their lines geometrically from four to six to fourteen, honoring women
for their contribution of capacious growth for humanity.
Whether the poet was aware of
this underlying structural message is unimportant—it exists as an inherent
feature of the poems, and is emblematic of how structure supports message in
several poems throughout this section and collection as a whole. The facing
concrete poems of “Craft” (shaped as the bonsai in a shallow dish which is the
subject of the poem) and the poem “It’s That Look” that reduces line-length
over twelve lines from six words to one, forming a wedge or knife enacting the
piercing look of a man that objectifies a woman—as well as the occasional “American”
sonnet juxtaposed with Shakespearian sonnets, and the one left and right
justified prose poem “Trespass” (although found in section three), which seems
to enact humanity’s obtrusiveness into the natural order of things—all are
examples of Weir’s inventiveness and craft that forward the messages of these
significant poems, making them even more delightful to read.
The final
section broadens the theme of connection to the current state of brokenness of
humanity’s way of organizing by means of domination the natural way of things. In
the collection’s penultimate poem, “Earth Casts Its Shadow Across the Moon”
(with the epigraph January 31, 2018, at 6:53 a.m.), the poet has
carefully chosen each word and line in the best order to add to this dire
message:
Drowsy in
dressing gown and boots, I idled along the driveway,
Cody’s
nose interpreting the happenings of the night.
Lifting my
gaze from the dog’s cheery tail, I chanced
to glance
westward and saw through dark branches
a great
orb, a bruised-looking eye, mottled
in shades
of purple and ruby, its lens a brilliant disc of light,
focused
downwards, as though studying its parent, seeing
how Earth
burns and suffocates in the smog of our needs,
the moon,
itself, trespassed by our ambitions,
our planet
home, burdened by our burgeoning demands.
I
shivered. The moon’s eye blinked shut.
In my typical way of wanting more connection with the
reader for my own poems, I might rush to suggest to the poet to change the
tense of this poem from past to present—since this state of burden upon the
natural we have caused is far from in the past. However, there is a subtle
message of hope that would be lost if Weir were to have followed my advice—a
message of hope that is more fully developed in the title poem that follows it,
a poem so organically connected, that it can be seen as additional stanzas to
this same poem.
When Our
World Was Whole
We near
the refuge as skeins of moonlit mist lift
and we
hear the music of a thousand cranes
roosting
in the shallows of restored wetlands.
Behind us,
the sun crests the horizon, feathering
white the
needles of frost on reeds and grasses.
No wind,
just the constant calling, as though
from
distant beginnings in an Eocene dawn,
when
creatures lived in common symmetry
before our
coming. In a clamor of wild voices
cranes rise into morning on slow wings.
If you enjoy Mary Oliver’s
work, you may find this second collection by Elizabeth Weir even more
compelling, as she spends a more appropriate amount of time on the human factor:
familial and other relational groupings; humans found in tension with the
natural world, but deserving of equal time, speaking to the false dichotomy
between the two—the same mistake made by those who would subordinate women to
men, subjugate one race over another, one calling over another. Weir has
answered the “constant calling…from distant beginnings… / when creatures lived in
common symmetry…” Hers is one of the “wild voices… / rising into morning on
slow wings.” May we hasten her by heeding her warnings and answering the same
call in accordance with our hearing.
Elizabeth Weir has two books of poetry, "When Our World Was Whole," and her first, "High on Table Mountain." The latter was nominated for the 2017 USA Midwest Book Award. She’s the recipient of four S.A.S.A. Jerome Awards and recent work has been published in The London Reader, Evening Street Review, Comstock Review, Agates, Talking Stick and North Meridian Review.
