Hers is a geode still hollowing a room for crystals.
When someone tells me that ‘the heart is found a hand-length under the earth, turning hard / sun on the black bed of the sea,‘ my eyes flash with significant shine as I lean in—and I want more than anything for this promise to carry me straight to that black bed.
And when the assertion is followed by ‘the heart’s planted, sung little X / strewn down in a wet acre,’ I am almost unyoked of my cynic, I hold my breath to go down with that diver—but the ‘husband’s scroll’ stops me, and instead I graze the reef: I watch her rill of words, the love of repartee revealed, the wit, sensuous sound, a fetish for enjambment.
I can’t drown myself for this verse. Why? Not because it lacks virtue, skill, or gift. But because of the ‘Come & get it,’ ‘pistils out’; because the feral-aesthete grooming of this verse is too bound to a cultural machine that is in fact a machine, not a greenhouse. ‘Mum is the word’ makes for a good clever wink, but what of the heartseed deep in sod and the earnest promise of that?
Let me pause and inject this nomination:
The Feral-Aesthete
The feral is the reclaimed wilderness of a thing that’s been civilized. The feral-aesthete is the illusion of the feral, made believable by a forcefully beautiful aesthetic. But unlike make-up on the wild horse, when this one washes off, there’s just a mannequin of mirrors posed inside. And inside that, there is a great thirst for approbation.
Thus pruned and groomed to its doom, “How to Make Love to the Greenhouse” turns coy and simpering and handsomely dressed, but not transforming. When I walk out of it, there’s no vine still coiled ’round my ankle, pulling me back.
Still, there’s a leaf in my pocket. There’s the promise of an authentic depth that could have been gotten into. In a culture that champions the mask of Dionysus, but not the wildness itself (an Apollonian drunkenness), I daresay this is the work of someone whose truer talents are held back, but true nonetheless.
It’s revealed in the first lines, and the last: ‘the heart aseed, I’ll be what breaks aloud, savage / germ. A crush in the tall grass. You be a violet thrust underfoot.’
There’s a blackgreen life in the impulse of her verse—it can’t be denied. And if it can be denied, then it only matters that it’s not denied by the poet.
SHARKPACK Poetry Review 