Passing Through Blue Earth by Cynthia Neely
Bright Hill Press, 2016
“Loss, grief, mourning: death is indeed the mother of beauty, uniting poets of our time who have little else in common,” Jahan Ramazani says in his essay “Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?” Cynthia Neely’s award-winning chapbook brings us that impossible beauty-from-death in poems that reflect her deep connection to the natural world and our place in it.
Joan Didion has said, “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” Neely begins her collection with the poem “Hunger,” which struck me with the surprising connection between hunger and grief: how one endures an essential absence.
So much
depends on hunger.On the trail, a cougar watches,
tail tipped black and shivering,while the deer barely lift
their eyes from their browse.
It is the awareness of hunger in prey that gives the cougar a slight edge. But the poet experiences another kind of hunger.
I can’t smell anything
anymore. I eat
but I’m never satisfied.Absence hollowed out
from a fullness in my throat,every clean-sucked bone
a prayer.
Her grief has taken up residence in her core self, like a tapeworm, to the point of creating a new, unnatural hunger that hollows out the sense of meaning to life. The loss of an unborn child, which brought this absence and sorrow, is complicated by having been induced: the wrenching decision to terminate a pregnancy to save the mother’s life. “Hopewell Bay” gives us the details and agonizing decisions. It is a long poem of great density, both taut and paced with the solemn gait of a funeral, interspersing intensely emotional poetry with clinical references, the effect palpable, as one can feel in this excerpt:
Water takes on the color of its surroundings, so a body
of it can be blue-sky, black-night, gray.
It can be red as the cardinal flower it reflects,
or the buoy that marks the channel. It is green
as the grasses that edge the shore.
Grief’s like water it moves, it flows.
It buoys me up.
You lived in water.
Grief is a means of survival, not merely an emotion to get over: “It buoys me up.” Then she startles the reader by directly addressing her lost fetal-infant: “You lived in water.” The mother-poet’s grief inhabits the water-realm of her child.
This confluence of person and place drives Neely’s muse; one feels located in these poems, as she indeed feels place at the very core of her being, which reflects in her poetry. In “What This House Knows,” the house speaks for her:
an empty house is amplified, has more
to say than a filled one […]
how I came to be vacant
of words, imaginings, care.
We are in the end not only who we are, but who we are is also where we are, intertwined. And despite death’s power to take what is most dear to us, Neely brings us a sense of both urgency and transcendence here on “this blue planet / this perfect earth” which “we are only passing through.” This is a moving and elegant collection, well worth the time one passes with it.
Siham Karami’s work can be found in such places as The Comstock Review, Able Muse, Pleiades, Tupelo Quarterly, The Rumpus, and featured in Orchards Poetry, among others. Her first full-length collection is forthcoming in early 2019. Nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she blogs at sihamkarami.wordpress.com.