JONEL
ABELLANOSA Reviews
Alley of Dreams by Anne Britting Oleson
(Clare Songbirds
Publishing House, New York, 2018)
After
I lost my beloved dalmatian, Dexter, to kidney failure on Christmas Day in
2017, I plunged myself in the self-study of the afterlife. I wanted to believe
that the afterlife is also real for the animals we love. I want to believe that
my beloved companion for more than eight years, Dexter the dalmatian, is
happiest now in a much better place beyond what dog lovers know as “the rainbow
bridge.” Having lost all my life’s savings to the almost eight months of
Dexter’s treatment and regular veterinary hospital confinement, his medicines
and the almost weekly fluid therapy, and to doing my best in providing him the
best possible and most comfortable life and living for his last several months,
I could no longer afford to buy books. In the months that followed, until
today, of my self-study of the afterlife, I relied on the internet—Google for
articles and papers, and YouTube for lectures and interviews of experts in the
field. And then I received from my publisher, Laura Williams French, this
poetry collection from fellow Clare
Songbirds Publishing House author, Anne Britting Oleson: Alley of Dreams. The timing reinforced
my belief in synchronicity, as if something cosmic was reassuring me that hope
for a better world, a better existence, is the sine qua non of life and living.
I
began my self-study of the afterlife biased. It seems redundant that I have to
prove to myself without doubt that the afterlife exists—that it is both a
better state of being and place. Even without having started this in-depth self-study,
no one and nothing can convince me otherwise that my beloved dalmatian, Dexter,
is much happier in a place so much better. My discoveries inevitably branched,
and continue to branch, into specialized subject matters, like Near Death
Experiences (NDEs), Out of the Body Experience (OBEs) or Astral Projection,
Buddhism and Hinduism, spirituality and religion, cosmology and metaphysics,
reincarnation and past life memories, and a smattering of neurology,
psychology, consciousness studies and quantum mechanics. I don’t need to
understand fully these specialized fields. I only need to have an intuitive
grounding, as it were, in order to confirm what I already know and believe in—that the afterlife is real, that death isn’t what most of us think it is but
some sort of a transition, that we survive death and live on in another
dimension in another mode of being after we leave our bodies.
Practically
all near-death experiences, according to experiencers and experts, have one
important thing in common, and this commonality finds its place in Anne
Britting Oleson’s Alley of Dreams. It
is the heightened vividness of the experience, particularly visually, that make
people, who have passed through the threshold, as it were, and returned,
recount that the afterlife is the real life and that this corporeal existence
is the dream. They describe a colorful dimension of intensity and unmistakable
delineation—for example the edges of petals pulsing with lucidity. In Britting
Oleson’s collection of 24 poems, this dimensional clarity, this experiential
vividness, is in spectacular display. Lines such as
The
number, on a scrap of paper/ran in blue rivulets
You
sense them all - the tails,
the
organdy gowns - as they swirl past,
the
ghostly coquettes smiling
at
men who sailed long ago
from
this sparkling promise
into
disappointed old age and death
and
They
are warp to the weft of our evening:
safe
inside around the lamp
prod
our sense of fractal burgeoning, twirling like pieces of a light-edged
kaleidoscope. Rhythms seem to pulse independent of words and phrases, although
the ebbs and flows reinforce sounds in their syllabic dimension, and they
inevitably conjure color in the mind. sparkling promise, for instance,
bequeaths old age and death in the succeeding line a whiteness that is
almost glass.
Color
isn’t the only lure to perception that is free of dilution. Smells are almost
visual, visceral as a lucid dream. In “The Clank of Bells in the Roadway” she
writes:
After
sundown, the shapeshifters,
darker
than air through which they move,
shuffling
beneath occasional lowing,
smell
of dung and sweet clover.
In
“Shade”: Each breath/she drew in carried his scent precipitates The
air (that) hummed like/the paired strings of his mandolin in the
succeeding lines.
Nor
do the lines stop at cross-sections of smells. In “Looking Back Up the Hospital
Drive,” the primacy of taste propels the first tercet into an emotional
ambiguity in the second tercet:
They
do not come easy to me, these words
like
glass in my mouth, cutting until
I
taste blood:
the
blood whispering through the chambers
of
an enlarged heart, failing
the
old woman at the upstairs window.
Aurally,
the poems move in varying degrees of dexterity, the shorter lines moving
faster, full of anticipations created by alliteration, assonances and echoes:
She
held the peppermill
in
her palm, the pad
or
she
had closed his eyes, gently,
she
still glanced up every time
at
the sound of a footfall,
at
the creaking of a door.
The
longer lines are slower, hypnotic, hypnogogic, deployed with the receding lulls
from an expert hypnotist:
I
do not recognize the landscape, but realize,
as
one finds the way in dream country:
these
are the Smokey Mountains
or
The
stones in their bed of cut grass murmur darkly,
or
perhaps that’s the foreboding in your blood.
Which
brings us to what has been conveniently called “the sixth sense” —the most
relatable aspect of Britting Oleson’s poetry to the apprentice of the
supernatural—and the ways it perceives or penetrates otherwise imperceptible
dimensions of being. “The sixth sense” is almost as reductionist as scientific
materialism, because it fails to a large extent in encapsulating the whole
range of untapped psychic abilities all living beings possess. The poet,
especially, is expected to perceive more, to see and hear and smell and taste
things that to most people are probably nonexistent. But to the poet nothing is
impossible. To the poet the proof of anything’s existence lies in the
imagination. If it exists in the mind, it exists. In reading poetry, one of the
first things I look for is the poet’s mind at work—especially a consciousness
suggesting nonlocality, as I want to believe that consciousness doesn’t reside
in the brain, in which case it implies continuity, death only a threshold
breached upon transition from physical existence to the afterlife.
I’d
call Britting Oleson’s visual technique “superimposition,” as though the poet
has perceived at least two worlds or dimensions and has merged the tangible and
the intangible—in ways that make the invisible at last perceivable. It takes
re-readings for blooming realizations, her poetry enjoyable in a new manner at
each return, as if the reader is bequeathed with new eyes each time. The last
couplet in “The Clank of Bells in the Roadway” sums up the entire collection’s
reading experience: the first line—we don’t see them until they’re gone—objectifies
the unmentioned, formalizes what at first glance seems shapeless, concretizes
articles of intuition, exteriorizes inner vicissitudes like feelings into
materiality; the couplet’s second line—and then we’re uncertain they were
here at all—reiterates the necessity of yet another re-reading, because
corporeality seems to have vanished back into the spiritual, the visualized returned
to the misty from where it earlier actualized. This seeming regression isn’t a
justification for the impermanence of the illusory, but should rather be an
argument that in the physical world, wherein our current existence anchors our
senses, other dimensional aspects of being rely on evocation. A fine line
dividing evocation and imagination is crucial to determining what exists in
another dimension and what exists only in the mind. This fine line could be
faith or belief. But when two worlds or dimensions become one the distinction
between imagination and evocation blurs into invisibility. Britting Oleson
skillfully weaves the visible and the evocable in lines such as:
Is
she real, or an old reflection, standing
with
an upraised hand, waving
or
patting hair into place?
Her
poems are populated with ghosts, shapeshifters, the old occupants of the
older house, dead children, departed loved ones, the blue-cold ectoplasm
of winter. A walk by the river, in a dawn that frowned with the threat
of snow, brings the reader in the vicarious freeze of the frigid air to the
sudden epiphany of looking up—to see what might have me in its sights. The
poet is fully aware of ghostly participation in ordinary life and living, not
so much because the wraiths straddle both worlds as the very strong proposition
that there is no distinction between this life and the next. Dead children play
in the woods—girls in floating while dresses, boys in short pants - and
to them the poet and her readers are the apparition, or they, too, aren’t aware
that our worlds have overlapped. The poems argue by showing that death is an
illusion, that consciousness survives the body’s dissolution. The poems show
that death as transition and not cessation allows us to bring with us into the
afterlife our memories, our loves and anxieties, our cares and preferences.
Each poem is at least two poems, if the reader separates the worlds, the words
and their images from the shaped silences and their echoes. The poems in this
collection reassure me that my beloved dalmatian, Dexter, hasn’t entered
inexistence after his death but is alive and in fact standing next to me
wagging his tail as I write these last words.
I
don’t need scientific proof because I believe. It gives me hope.
*****
Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, the
Philippines. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle,
Poetry Kanto, Anglican Theological Review, Mojave River Review, Marsh Hawk
Review, The Filipino-American Artist Directory and Star*Line . His
poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars
award. His fourth chapbook, Songs from My
Mind’s Tree, has been published in early 2018 by Clare Songbirds
Publishing House (New York), which will also publish his full-length
collection, Multiverse, in late 2018.
His poetry collection, Sounds in Grasses
Parting, is forthcoming from Moran Press.
