NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews
thousands by Lightsey Darst
(Coffee
House Press, Minneapolis, 2017)
Thousands…thousands of what? Thousands of
women in thousands of places thinking these thoughts and experiencing these
dreams, desires and fears thousands of times. The title of this collection is
not all that far removed from Darst’s regular book column Thousand Furs in which she writes engagingly about specific books
that a fictional character has read and gives us so much more at the same time.
As in the case of the present collection, we must never assume that the content
is autobiographical unless the writer chooses to let us know that this is the
case.
Dear fear… Dear what-I’ll-do…Dear good advice…Dear
Wednesday, 7:13 a.m….Dear yes…Dear spirit, what shall I do with my life? Such is the prominent
motif of the first and second sections of this latest collection from poet,
teacher and dancer, Lightsey Darst. In keeping with the structure of a musical
composition, it returns later on: Dear
darkness…Dear think on it…Dear I thought enough. It is the way the music of this book is
scored.
Repetition
is just one of the many devices Darst uses that she refers to as “form”. In an
interview that she did for Whole Beast
Rag she says, “I also really love things that push with form in some way or
another. And form is such a huge category. I think when we say the word ‘form’
people often think it has to be a sestina or sonnet, but you know, it can be
something like repetition. Form can be syntax, form can be how your titles
relate to your poem, form can even be the kind of content you allow in, because
you have a formal rule for what content gets in [to your head]. To me, anything
that pushes formal boundaries in some way, that’s something I hunger for.”
This
opening form of address is Darst’s way of writing a public letter about private
matters to the world. Among other things, those matters are to do with marital
indiscretion, fear, doubt and longing. On another level they are about finding
oneself and one’s place in the world. It is a poem about searching in which the blind side feels for itself.
The
structure of the book breaks with convention. It can be read as one long poem in
five parts. The first three parts are set in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the
last two are set in Durham, North Carolina. Each one covers a specific period
of time from before 2011 to after 2014 and each part reads as a series of diary
entries but these are backed up by notes in the margins which comprise specific
dates, authors (Susan Sontag, Antonin Artaud, Mary McCarthy, Juliana Spahr,
etc) book titles, sources, quotations and even some of the locations where the
poems were written. The whole has the effect
of being a collage in which the reader is given that extra bit of insight in
order to be better informed.
The
artwork on the front cover, Untitled,
from diary 1966 by German-born, American sculptor Eva Hesse, which shows
page two of a notepad (with words yet to be written on it) superimposed over
another page, this time with writing on it, points to references to Eva Hesse
in the margins of the text and also to the structure of the book as a kind of
diary.
The
tone is introspective, philosophical and confessional – a story line that
gradually unfolds and impacts itself upon the emotions of both the writer and
the reader.
The
opening offers us in a few lines both tragedy, healing (through time and
changed circumstances) and longing:
“The love of my life died in a
motorcycle crash”
her words went through me like
a needle through tulle
(now she has three children
tenure, a husband, a tolerably
well-furnished house).
The student writes,
The weeding is an important day
in everyone’s life.
“I’d kill for love
kill for la a uv”
The
word weeding is interesting. It is so
close to “wedding” and also to a widow’s weeds, the idea of mourning, or even
of gardening, of weeding out all the bad things in life. There is also a sense
of the section coming full circle with the very real death in the first line
and death in the literal sense – that is, hypothetical sense, at the close.
That patch of weeds will come back towards the end of the book, in the fourth
section, where the reader is exhorted to
pluck it up.
Darst
is not afraid to explore the map of human emotion. In the sections on matrimony,
for instance, she writes how it is
possible
To make love to one, thinking
of another
bored with her good marriage
observing
how we conceal stories until
they swell inside us.
Some of
the most poignant moments in the book are connected to a longing for a child:
Be honest: it makes me ashamed
that I’m halfway to seventy &
I can’t
earn enough to have a child –
maternity care
isn’t covered on my current
insurance.
This is
not, however, a book about despair. It is a book that is intimate, open and
honest, one that deals with complex feelings in a philosophical framework. It
is one in which Darst knows how changing just one letter in a word can make all
the difference:
keep typing lovely when [you]
mean lonely.
In the
same vein, while snow may be a metaphor
for everything / lower than the predicted low, she is not insensible to the
beauty of nature, to late autumn maples… [an]
acre of lemon trees…magnolias in bloom…[the] variegated upright streak of an
amaryllis…bees burying themselves in heather bells, etc. Nature is
beautiful and there are many other things that are noted as being beautiful in
this book. In fact, the word beautiful
makes its appearance no less than 18 times throughout the text. That is surely
significant in itself.
In a
video presentation broadcast by Twin Cities Public Television, Minneapolis, Darst
says “I think one of the things that drives me to write poetry is this desire
to do justice to the world I see around me. There’s the idea of speaking the
truth about bad things that happen. I see a lot of people trying very hard and
loving other people a lot and putting so much of their effort into the world
and I want to try to commemorate that.”
This is
precisely what this book does. Forbidden thoughts are given a voice in a text
that is rich, challenging and rewarding. In the fourth section she writes:
Tell me you still need me
Reader.
My
answer to that is an emphatic “Yes!”
*****
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, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014) and Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press,
2017).
