Sleeper,
Rachel Adams’ second chapbook, from Flutter Press, captures the
spiritual weight of a fresh perspective. The poems latent content
are very much about that moment when your perspective shifts, whether
it's a workman lamenting his failures, or a father reading at home,
or the experience of a rail sleeper car, Adams shapes a beautiful arc
of poems in this handsome chapbook out of California.
Sleeper also
explores how work and the physical spaces we occupy affect us. Her
use of personae
poem, or dramatic monologue, allow the poet to explore history, both
personal and historical. Adams makes the poetry of Sleeper look
easy, and sound easy.
Adams’s employs a
casual, long rhythm style, like that of a trombone sliding over
notes. Almost all of Sleeper’s poems use a combination of
long and short lines, that contrast the reader’s eye, but lengthen
the notes of the poem. Obviously this is Whitmasesque, in the true
American style, yet the dark lyric notes of Dickinson, turn up in
the music of the poems. Consider the opening poem, “Solstice”,
about her father’s love of history, and of his youth. It’s a
lonely kind of poem, striking the perfect elegiac tone of American
verse. It’s aptly titled, for not only does it frame the reader’s
setting in time, but it also brings to mind solace, and solitude,
which are also subjects of “Solstice.” Furthermore the poem
frames the entire chapbook, giving us a glimpse of what is to come.
Adams mines personal and world history for Sleeper, and in the
opening poem the two hold hands, as she writes about her father
reading. She commands the poem so it reminisces, almost, about his
travel and college days, a blending of construction and second hand
memory.
Adams longer lines
such as “My father is reading The Kingdoms of Europe/framed
against the bright, blank air/that settles in the open window”
isn’t perfect blank verse, but Adams hits the iambic strides. Adams
writes gracefully, the breath pausing at the end of most lines, and
never choking up the rhythm with a unsure note. Without saying her
father is like a king, she gives us the image of a man, framed in a
window, or for that matter a picture frame. Adams’ attention to
detail brings the reader into the poem’s architecture. The longer
lines are loose and gather the reader up. Later in the poem when she
describes Edinburgh's “wet streets, black as peat marshes” you
can almost hear Anne Sexton, or for that matter Seamus Heaney’s
voice croaking out the hard sounds of the t, the k, contrasting with
the soft slippery s’s.
Adams excels at the
personae poem. Over the last few years hipster poets have reclaimed
the personae poem by adopting a collective voice, Adams however
employs the poem as dramatic monologue. Whereas a collective voice
can come across as personal, slippery, and confessional, the dramatic
monologue allows the reader to see the mask; an important cue for the
reader, something that’s often lost in a collective voice, where
the audience gets lost in the is it or isn’t ironic posture.
There’s two dramatic monologues in Sleeper, one from the
point of view of a Baltimore mill worker”Life’s Work”, and the
other from John White’s pov as he returns to the Roanoke colony and
finds them gone in “Croatoan.” Both personae poems put personal
acceptance right up front. The mill worker must accept the perils of
his work, the injuries, the toll the physical work demands upon the
body, just as White must accept the horror that the people he was
responsible for have disappeared. Both men, interestingly enough,
feel the loss within. There is no rage but the quiet rage. The tones
of both poems are reminiscent of “Solstice,” and like “Solstice”
feature a father figure in silent meditation. Adams’s eye has a
flair for the dramatic, the poems end on a fixed image of nature, the
cold winter sky, and the fog hanging back at the edge of a North
Carolina swamp.
Her poetic ear and
eye are sharp hunters, and Adams crafts a solid chapbook with
Sleeper. The title poem captures the mood of the book. Named
after a railroad sleeper car, Adams describes the spiritual weight of
travel, that feeling one gets when in route when one is present and
noticing the slight changes in the environment. The stillness of the
car, the pace the train slows to as it coasts into town. In
particular her poem about driving in a snowstorm and having to stop
and stay at a stranger’s house in “On a Night Spent in Hazelton,
Pennsylvania” nails the strange qualities of having to sleep in a
strange house, the little details of place, which are the food of
travelers. These are the moments that make travel so important to our
world view.
And Adams reminds us
that the travel does not have to great places in Europe, or the Far
East, a simple re-experiencing of a familiar place such as your
parent’s house can change the way you look at things forever. that
spiritual weight, this feeling of place, is present in “Habitation”
which seeks to capture that silent vibration of life, of the movement
of a house and of the lives lived there as the ‘house drives itself
into the wet autumn ground.”
Adams’ voice has
muscle, confidence, perhaps best exemplified in “Shark Message.”
Here she channel’s the energy and power of commanding a world.
“I’ll bury this tooth in the sand/down with the insects/and
ancient rubbed down glass...I’ll notice the gulls....” Spell-like
and mystical Adams captures the clashing sounds and sights of the
litter/graveyard beach where people go to play in the summer. She
doesn’t hate the beach, but rather realizes, and owns the fact that
she’s essentially sitting on a pile of sea pulverized bones and
refuse.
The book ends with
“Keep On” which reminds me so much of Larry Levis’ work because
it is lilting poem about leaves, and in a Levis kind of way is a
pretty poem about essentially nothing. “Keep On” is just about a
“we,” presumably a couple, driving at night, noticing the leaves
as the landscape rolls on. And again Adams is capturing the spiritual
weight of the moment, and one gets the feeling she will never look
at leaves the same way again.
The poems of Sleeper
are hushed, they gather night and solitude up in their poetic arms
and offer them to the reader. Like being up late at night listening
to the noises a house makes when everyone is quiet and full of sleep.
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