Ashes In Midair by Susan Settlemyre
Williams,
By Larry Bradley
In Susan Settlemyre Williams’ haunting first book of poems, there is the immediate sense that what we hope to possess is not a thing easily enticed by casual flirtation, but one we find ourselves pursuing all the way home, even if only to stand outside and hammer our hands at the door until we are allowed to enter.
But enter Williams does. In the very first poem, we begin the book at a threshold – hands in the dark / hallway, curling like claws – a reptilian image for sure, but one which immediately gives way to an opening up of the book, an opening out to its own hunger.
Through out much of the first part of “Ashes In Midair” there are warnings:
Don’t be afraid . . .Don’t
let us down . . .
Don’t speak
to people in the street
Don’t go out after dark
(“Codes For Hunger”)
Don’t look at the sun
(“About Glass”)
Don’t let him see you hurt
Don’t look
Don’t let on
anything matters
(“Hurricane”)
This is the counsel of The Experienced One, against desire, against need. It is also the voice of The Poet. Part One is filled with these longings which, as we know, usually find themselves through repetition. It is in the speaker’s attempt to secure them, however, that her true realization comes:
I needed to find out on my own
Such tone is a warning of her own: these presumptions upon another’s experience stands to make coddlers of us all. We must believe her when she confesses in “Woman Burying Something” that
there’s nothing
I’m trying to cover up
The mythology she employs in “About Glass,” with the mother’s litany of things a child must never do (stare at the sun, put coins in the mouth) is built around the structure of old wives tales. This book is laden with potent mythologies, often echoing the stories of the Brothers Grimm: “Rapunzel,” “The Golden Key,” “Snow White,” “The Glass Coffin.”
And Grimm could be awfully grim, as Anne Sexton showed us in her own “transformations.” Though Sexton knew the witch’s trick, she rarely, if ever, had Williams’ subtlety and restraint. The malevolence here is coolly masked, which inevitably creates the most immovable terror, as Hitchcock has clearly proven. Terror hides itself for a reason. As she writes in “Dealing With Beauty:”
fear’s easy, flows
too without effort
Certainly, not every poem in her “Ashes” is contained by its mere darkness. Many of them are rapturous, unashamedly Biblical in the epic sense of that word ---God is, indeed, in the details, even though the face of God is never a human face --- and quite funny at times, as in the poem “Gathering Eggs:”
Before too much blame, remember, nobody
loves chickens
That sudden direct address in the penultimate stanza is confrontational, and lops off the narrative with its guilty justification, separating the poem’s earlier egg gathering from the inevitable demise of the chicken,
racing headless between life and death
Much of Susan Settlemyre Williams’ poetry does just that: it races between what we are given and what we have lost. With that hurriedness, that working back and forth structure, one gets the feeling these poems are actually a single elegiac poem, brimming with an empathic voice and a tenderness which is often rare in a debut collection, and rarer still in a post 9-11 world whose nerve-endings are continually numbed by terror and never-ending broadcasts.
But, that said, there is real terror in this poetry. In the Southern sequence “Kathryn: A Calling” she writes making was sin, with all of its fire & brimstone bravado intact. It suggests the fear of creation creates a further madness, in this case the art one is capable of making --- the bleached and painted skulls of dead animals. This sequence is made more unsettling by an “Angel” consultant who speaks to Kathryn, suggesting color-schemes, foils, or beads, all the while reminding her it is
Your
work. . .
Your work is
not for other people’s eyes
That is the most terrifying notion for any artist: what has been created, in the end, is the end; one was never meant to be discovered. It is the artist’s sole responsibility to remain invisible.
This cloak of invisibility is carried forth into the third part of the book. In “Echo In Drought,” she writes
I
am only voice and shadow. . .
. . . I have been without
my shadow for a long time
Here, concealment hovers, unnamable, confusing; even in the song of the “Black Hole,” where she creates a dialogue between scientific fact and Homeric mythology, the I is lost.
The parlaying back and forth of this poem becomes clearer when she references the Graiae, with the eye they share forth and back, being lost of course.
This dialogue (or is this merely an interruption?) continues in the poem “Tarocchi Appropriati” which is a superb piece of writing, and which brings to mind James Merrill’s “The Changing Light At Sandover.” Instead of a Ouija board, however, Williams relies on the Tarot for her medium. She manages the cards, her “spread,” the way a Sibyl would stone tablets. In a sense, to read is to be read. There are, of course, nods to Eliot and Jung, and even behind its funereal tone there are a few light moments. When she asks her card reader if there is a card for middle-aged bald men, the response given is no,
but “bald. . . is sexy. . .except my ex. Cold fish.”
She credits David Wojahn’ s wonderful poem “Crayola” for
its form. Though “Tarocchi
Appropriati” stands completely on its own, one might be disappointed that it did not continue further along, with the prophetic cues of those cards mirroring an even further, kaleidoscopic witness in the speaker. Thematically and in composition, with its interruptions in thought, in its desolation, this is a hard poem to beat. But one senses it still has some fight left within it. She writes at its conclusion
Trying to rein them in takes all my strength
which, of course, was not Merrill’s dilemma (his came forth eagerly --- nearly 600 pages of earnestness), but it with hope, even some voyeuristic anticipation, that Williams brings forth her Madame Sosotris once more. And this medium of hers continues.
I want you radiant . . . Not dust hovering in brown summer air
she writes in “Albuquerque, Your Ashes In Midair,”
Your
dust doesn’t balance
anything
We know she is addressing the spirit of a deceased loved-one, but also recognizes the human dilemma of trying to keep things whole, our attempts to disassemble Eliot’s fear in a handful of dust to create something more personal, something meant to be discovered, one which stands.
The narrative of “Ashes In Midair,” seen in its entirety, is a journey reminiscent of Sexton’s “To Bedlam and Partway Back” (as Williams calls it, Going back / to what now hurts); it is her ¾ spiral through confounding loss and impotence which allows the madness, which clouds her own comprehension of those histories ---
I don’t understand weightlessness
or perfect balance
In the final ¼ of the book, we are heading partway back from this Southern Bedlam, in pursuit of recovery, however fleeting. Now it is hallowed ground to be sought ---
that instant
when your perfect attention changes
and unchanges you or the world
the past as something to hold onto as readily as one can. Though that grasp oftentimes can be difficult to master,
I see nothing--- the nothing that last week
was a road
the journey becomes its own memento. This is recollection as Insta-matic, as a flash of brilliance, which is what memory really is. It is also unsalvageable, as she demonstrates in the heart-wrenching poem “Dementia Diary.” The poet’s mother, suffering from dementia ---I got / all turned around --- is trying to make sense of her surroundings. She telephones, she plots an escape. But it is impossible to escape from one place into a past you no longer recognize:
She can’t see
the way out when it’s in front of her
In the subsequent poem, “Pathetic Fallacy,” the best hope for survival (however short-lived its return) can be seen in a green-leaved begonia, though everything else wilts around it –
other houseplants, a loved-one slowly eaten by cancer ---and, she writes, it is with
not more coincidence
than the ordinary fact that something is always
dying
The near end-rhymes in many of these poems help Williams rein in these nether-worlds of feeling, real or imagined, and take possession of her material. This is a book about possession in every sense of the word: the spiritual (“Kathryn: A Calling” and “Woman Dressed In Her Long Hair”), the forced imprisonment (“Ars Poetica: Philomel” and “Codes For Hunger”), as well as its inevitable assets (“The Saints Of April”).
In the fourth section of the concluding poem “Lighter,” the universe is born from a divine miscalculation – God’s primordial error --- and in it Eve wonders
how will anything happen if I don’t know the taste of it
It is a question which echoes our need to experience in order to be. These poems are hard-won and emotionally arresting. They emerge from that necessity to endure, taking possession of those things which possess us, which devastate us or lift us up to a place we can only know through human expression, however limited it might seen. And that knowledge, that ultimate consummation, is an absolute necessity in Susan Settlemyre Williams’ poetry.
LARRY BRADLEY’s work has appeared
in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Southwest Review
and The Yalobusha Review. His
manuscript "The Spirit Of Gravity" was a finalist
for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the Walt Whitman Award, and The National
Poetry Series.