KYLAN RICE Reviews
Roseate, Points of Gold
by Laynie Browne
(Dusie, 2011)
Bodies waken to each other in a cross-light
that shines through, each to each, each a wake, iridescence of quivering lipid
lenses. One of us lies within the other, eye-to-eye refracting, “suspended like
translucent bodies whose movements reveal luminescence.” One-on-one as if
between, there is a curtain, then a hand, darkly against glass, touch or grace.
Finding, in reality, there is no glass at all, nor lens, for “lenses fall away
from the rushing of crinolines,” from the fabrics and flukes of the body, for
“the body is a curtain,” cleaving and recombining in a draft of air, in globes
of air rising from our lungs underwater, or, as if underwater, there floats “one
body within another, as the moment of separation dissolves”—our own clear eyes
having “foretold this day within which / there is no separation between this
water and another.” So this quiet rupture. Quiet apotheosis of you through me,
and vice versa.
But the surreal, sunken and brocaded
corporeality of Laynie Browne’s Roseate,
Points of Gold, does not happen in a vacuum. As I have tried to suggest, it
occurs in and through other bodies—here, the mother’s body. Browne’s book
unfolds, at least in part, as a gestational experiment, tracking the
development of a you within a me. But more than that, as she sets “out in
search of a question” by writing in series, each poem a stem-cell compounding,
Browne reveals the question, the doubled, refracted interior that one becomes
when bearing another’s body: “Now clearly she walks horizontally in both
directions at once, recognizing the dimensionless quality of being (as the
winter light), yet proceeding with an absolute form.”
Browne’s poems register the realization
of interiority by virtue of the slow articulation of another interior (a
child’s, “dressed in cartilage and bone”) forming inside the one that preexists.
In writing these, it is as if “she walks across / a landscape of shells / whose
splintered edges / draw the eye” observing
Opal— tints
and
chambers
rose
once
known only
to
their
inhabitants.
The rose and opal on the inside of the subject of these
poems would not be known if not broken, just as the maternal subject in Roseate, Points of Gold would not come
to the realization of an inner world that is in fact an outer if not for a
similar, cryptic breaking that occurs in the opening lines of the book:
I have broken the black paper band
which once held these movements together
…breaking of forgotten notions
how a night can spread
a luxuriant paper fan
This fan continues to unfold in the poem that follows, “reveal[ing]
its pleats” as the “Accordion nature of thought...Precipitated by a number of
cells dividing,” the subdivisions of a blastocyst. Here, Browne correlates the
development of the fetal body with the parallel emergence of a new kind of
ruptured thinking, a thinking through the self, which she fields across the
extent of the book, exploring the effects of a nested interiority, optical and
concave, rendering a close-up of textures and ornate detail.
The indeterminate oceanic space that
Browne’s poems inhabit, strewing the undulant surface like floral wreaths, is
evocative of H.D.’s Sea Garden
(1916). In the final stanza of “Sea Rose,” perhaps the most well-known poem in
H.D.’s collection, fragrance hardens into a leaf: “Can the spice-rose / drip
such acrid fragrance / hardened in a leaf?” Similarly, Browne observes how
“Form follows fragrance—a skin which expands to match movement, pressing
through marbled light, breaking in strands, following arcs and concavities,
exploring the invisible dimension of matter.”
Here, nothing invisible stays that way for long; everything comes to
light. And yet, objects and persons formed fully are not permitted to remain
that way. True, “form within matches form without,” but in this world of
“Descending light” and “Iridescence,” where a plurality of interiors are
interpenetrated by exteriors and vice versa, I am “No longer surprised to
witness loss of form.” Browne struggles, as I speculate many mothers do, with
the concurrent, warping deformations, both to body and identity, that attend a
nine-month’s forming.
However, a loss of form does not mean
formlessness—it just requires instead a change of perception, a lateral valence.
To this end, Browne wonders, “If departure from form indicates a collapse in
the landscape which once supplied locations for meeting, where is that hemisphere
beyond the senses?” Again the “invisible dimension of matter” slips down across
Browne’s gaze like a gelatinous cap, “returning body beyond form.” It did so
similarly for H.D., whose own “thoughts of tendriled ether” arrived during a difficult,
stormy pregnancy, which brought her and her child to the Scilly Isles, off
Cornwall, where she recuperated under the care of a close friend. As Albert
Gelpi describes, it was on these islands that H.D. felt “moved into moments of
consciousness in which feelings of separateness gave way to a sense of organic
wholeness....”[1]
The personally traumatic “collapse” she experienced while pregnant “gave way to
coherence and alienation to participation in a cosmic scheme”—sensations the
poet herself described as a “jelly-fish consciousness..., a set of
super-feelings” like a “closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone” that “extend
out and about us” like “long, floating tentacles.” As H.D. discovered, the
sensory seat of these super-feelings, described in Notes on Thought & Vision, composed during her pregnancy, was
the head as much as the “love-region of the body,” where they folded, tripled,
and fanned out like a fetus.
Precipitated by a body within a body, Browne
explores a similar jelly-fish consciousness in Roseate, Points of Gold. Staged in cycles and series, the
dissolution of the self and its form is discovered, in fact, to be the content
of “becom[ing] itself each instant,” like a “sepal” or “sea-tulip.” The lesson
extends beyond the reach of motherhood: in fact, until re-reading the
collection, I wasn’t fully aware of the gestational narrative threading the
whole. What remained, instead, was an insight into a self-disruption through
writing, a loosening permitting internal perambulations, as though the “indivisible
center” contained within the “hollow” body had come unhinged behind the
breastplate, that “first true bone to be born…, surrounding the turreted trees
through which she travels.” In this inversion, the body’s armor becomes a
fortress turned inside-out, containing the outer world, just as “the mind is
set around the body like a bone clasp which must be opened before intention
becomes identical with form.” In other, less elegant words, Browne reverses
what is typically contained with what contains: mind enshrouds body, turrets
surround forest, child surrounds mother. Of course, as ever, demarcation
remains porous, “edges disintegrate and extend to the other side,” which
dissolves any hierarchy between container and contained, cathexis and
catharsis, body and soul.
Thus, the mother is sent abroad, though
burdened by “a basket of thought,”
In every posture
bassinet bone
Indeed, it is as if “sitting, the body changes, in this
illusion of stillness.” It may have been the intention of the subject of the
book to seek “the opposite of setting out, to be oneself a catalyst,” but by
the end of Roseate, Points of Gold it
is reckoned that one is always to be found “Steps from the known / to encompass
another form.” Driven by “movement within the body which emanates from another
source,” Browne leads us through stillness, through “a labyrinth spread[] as
the fingers of the newborn.” Mystery unspools into mystery: the strange thought
of an unknowable growth-within is superseded by the impossible destiny of the
being who eventually emerges; “Body unhinges matter. From creation sprung
possibility. Gold clasps upon their insteps.” Favoring the continuous serial
form, this is the audacity of Browne’s work, here in this book as well as
elsewhere: to demonstrate the possibilities that unfurl always, even in the
simplest gesture, or most daily task. The possible futures we are led into,
deeper into a labyrinth that is a clearing where we shall lose ourselves in
love, rarely realizing we have been guided there by a “guide whose hands are
small and exacting,” a guide whose “head fits into the palm of her hand.”
[1] Albert Gelpi, “The Thistle and
the Serpent in H.D., Notes on Thought
& Vision (San Francisco: City Lights, 1982), 11.
*****
Kylan Rice has an MFA from Colorado State University, and he is working on his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book reviews have been published by Colorado Review, West Branch, Carolina Quarterly and the Emily Dickinson Society Bulletin. Some of his poems can be found at Kenyon Review, The Seattle Review, and elsewhere.
