NEIL
LEADBEATER Reviews
Albedo by Kathleen
Jesme
(Ahsahta Press, Boise,
Idaho, 2014)
Kathleen
Jesme is the author of four previous poetry collections including Meridian (Tupelo Press) and The Plum-Stone Game (Ahsahta Press). She
is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and is a recipient
of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant. Her books have won the Lena Miles Wever
Todd and Snowbound Poetry prizes. She
lives in Minnesota.
The
title of the book, albedo, is a technical term for whiteness – and it refers to
the ratio of light reflected by an object, such as the surface of a planet, to
that received. Jesme hints at its definition in the opening poem, The Mythology We Have Now, when she
writes
The measure of
reflectivity of a body
depends on the frequency
of light and its angle of incidence
and later, in the same poem, Jesme mentions the word itself:
A pine forest in winter has among the lowest albedo
of any land environment
this is due partly
to the color of the pines
and partly to multiple scattering of sunlight within the
trees.
The cover design, a beautiful photograph of the slim, white
trunks of closely planted birch trees provides the perfect image for the book.
The season is winter and it is played out against the
backdrop of a father’s death. Light, darkness and shadow permeate this
collection. They are to be found in open windows and black shutters, black and
white piano keys, birds garbed in black, snow blindness and the dark patterns
of animals running through snow. Snow is
present from the start. It is the very first word that opens the collection.
Trees are ever present also. It maybe that these are a manifestation of the
trees that Jesme sees from the windows of her log house. In the Author’s
Statement and Biography published by Ahsahta Press, http://ahsahtapress.org
she states that “the trees were planted about 20 years ago. They are now 35
feet tall, but still pliant in the wind.” A faithful dog, maybe more than one
faithful dog, runs through these poems, as does time, clouds, birds and the
weather. Human activity is almost completely absent.
The collection is divided into three parts which make up a
coherent whole. The first section, which carries the title of the book, comprises
two long poems which have at their core mythology, alchemy, trickery and
fairy-tale. According to Jesme, the first section of the book was initially
inspired by reading she was doing about the German physician Anton Mesmer.
Jesme says “it is hard to say whether Mesmer was a great psychologist or a
complete charlatan. Both, actually. He was a trickster and a transformative
character on the liminal edge of the new psychology of the unconscious who
discovered that people could be ‘mesmerized’ – hypnotized – to reveal the
depths of the inner world and also made to act in ways they would not when fully conscious. This [first]
sequence also reflects the ideas of the alchemists, who were involved in
psychological transformation long before Freud and Jung came along.”
The middle section, which is headed Ordinary Work, contains 20 short, elliptical poems that continue to
employ much of the imagery that appears in the first section of the book but on
a more personal level. In this extended elegy for the speaker’s father’s death,
poems such as The Place Where Something Has
Been convey a keen sense of absence. The exquisitely crafted poem Collectively, short enough to quote in
full, illustrates the meditative aspect that Jesme brings to her writing:
Planes go over in smears of sound:
leaves click down through trees
centre the day
let it fall into
its crevice
and the night flow evenly
on either side
A plane is something else which comes and goes through her
poems. It is the plane that is present in the preceding section, the two-seater
Piper Cub that her father flew into the
wilderness of winter and it is also the one that is present in Map Of The Floating World. Jesme says
“when I was very young, I would stand on the shore of the Rainy River and watch
my father disappear into the sky in a big yellow bird with a red stripe, and I
thought he was magic. I began this book as a reflection on how people and
things come and go, altering continuously in our perception, and how we use
language to come to terms with those experiences…..the father becoming absent,
returning again in a tree and in a memory.”
The poem My Father
Calling Us Up is much less abstract than some of the others in this section
and provides us with a beautiful cameo of a much-cherished memory from
childhood.
In The Bell we
behold the spectacle of trees shedding their leaves in the Fall and learn of
the father’s oneness with the natural world:
My father’s umbilical attachment to the earth
made him
glorious in a small way
as by borrowing we come into being
Jesme says that “language is a bell that can be rung over
and over, and only silenced when the overtones finally die – and perhaps they
never do, but rather are flung into space and are travelling still through the
expanding universe.”
The final
section, headed Coastline, contains
fourteen poems of varying lengths. One of these poems, Infinite Coastline, references the work of Benoît Mandelbrot – a
mathematician whose fractal geometry has helped us to find patterns in the
irregularities of the natural world. Time and space frequently inform these
poems – the passage of time and the vastness of the universe. With Strings Attached is an extended
meditation on time:
…..time has no corners
and
always arcs, like electricity, shooting across
gaps
and connecting disparate chancels. It spins
on
its axis, tilted remarkably
like
the Earth, a small planet in an insignificant solar system
in
a Medea galaxy.
In the Nonet, nine paragraphs of prose depict
through the stark imagery of winter the absence of the loved one. In the second
paragraph, distance is measured in terms of a dog and a ball – an animal
vanishing and returning, retrieving the ball for its master except that here
the dog runs at all times with the ball, he cannot bear to be parted from it.
Transformation,
with references to the evolutionary stages of the butterfly, is another theme
that is present here. There is hope in these final poems. In Chrysós Jesme
writes:
…..I
suppose we may
meet
again but I don’t know
how.
but there is
still grief:
The
gap is wide and deep. I am accustomed
to
calling it a black hole although
that
is by no means
scientific.
In fact it is metaphorical.
At the end of
the day, some kind of closure may be glimpsed in this single line from Hard Believing Time:
My
faith is in the ground that holds the world in place.
Throughout
this collection careful attention is paid to how the poem sits on the page. Spacing
within lines, between lines and between stanzas conveys something of the
feeling of “white space” or absence. The
sparseness of the writing, especially in the middle section of the book, leaves
the reader with ample opportunity to reflect on what has not been said. There is so much that we do not know and
cannot see, so much more to our world. Fractal geometry is only just the start.
This is a
powerful testament – a journey into silence and back. There is grief but there
is also amazement at the vastness of the universe and all that there is that is
still to be discovered. Highly recommended.
*****
Neil
Leadbeater is an author, essayist,
poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and
poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and
abroad. His books include Librettos for
the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, Scotland, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus Press, England, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry
Space, England, 2014), Sleeve Notes (Bibliotheca
Universalis, Romania, 2016) and Finding
the River Horse (Littoral Press, England, 2017).
