Rachel Adams' debut chapbook, What is Heard, from Red Bird Chapbooks, is a fine collection, a gathering of poems rooted in time and place. Like most poets writing in the United States, during a decadent time for poetry, Adams primary mode is the poet of loss. These poems are in a quiet key, often whispers, often full of ache and want, taking in the sounds and images of the world; she does not speak to us from an academic tower, or from the hipster coffee house, but rather from a point between the two. Adams poems balance lyric sensibility with fine narrative detail.
The finer moments of What is Heard offer lyrical narratives, another modern American mode; It’s not lyric enough, or formal, for verse, nor narrative enough for rhetorical devices, or plot. It’s not a judgement, or a critique, rather a statement of fact. Consider “Sleepwalking” where the character, “As a boy, he would swing his nightshirted/body over the fence--feet bare/and eyes filmy, flat as concrete--”. There’s music in these lines, the opening three syllables soft vowels with long notes give way to the mnemonic swing, perhaps a nod to musicians, or Hart Crane’s subway riders from the harrowing “The Tunnel” as the character “swing his body over the fence,” unaware of his voyage, unaware that he walks out of his house and into his mother’s anxiety. Adams could be talking about American poetry in these lines, the arcane way our nation of poetry governs and views itself, our “bare feet”, “flat hard” free verse. But never you mind, Adams is showing us a sleepwalking boy, and giving us a feast of sounds as he “paus in vast cargo-ship silhouettes,/face turned toward the smokehouse steeples.” The boy is ultimately more in tune with his sleep self, his true self. He needs no guidance, and perhaps that’s what the mother fears most, the day when her boy will turn away from her. The sleeping boy’s impulse remains, lingers at the end of the poem, suggesting that most of us sleepwalk through our lives, unaware of where our body or our mind is guiding us.
Adams’ poems dig, in much the way Seamus Heaney’s poems have always dug, “There are stories in the ground,” the poet writes in “Sedimentary,” “in the low layers” and the poet in this manner is historian, and seeker, working deep within to get to the root of her voice, the history of her heart, so to speak.
And for a book entitled What is Heard, the poems read like a travelogue as well as a soundscape, as the poet tramps and travels to places, recording what she hears in the clacking and keying of syllable against syllable. Adams is a poet of setting, tethered here and there, Cooper River, in a lonely hospital room, up on Harvey Mountain, or watching a deer ghost out from the fog and return to wildness in a turn of birds. Often what teases out from these places, is a seer poet, a poet working towards a vision, perhaps one of history, of place, but of also the spirit. The speaker in “Kinetic,” “Harvey Mountain Sound Walk,” and “Northerly” the poet speakers seeks sounds, as if recording the music of spaces could answer some deep question of the spirit. “Tell me the sound of one hand moving...” she writes in “Northerly” and “We note, like fastidious scientists, what is heard” in “Harvey Mountain Sound Walk,” a poet who not only gathers her history, but collects sounds as if they were gems.
“Deer Dream” the final poem in the chapbook offers up a vision of the poet seer, “a mound of earth talismans” a sense of loss and of more loss coming, of belonging with the earth and her strange turns. Adams is young enough to have great work ahead of her, what kind of poems she will dig for, or craft from air and sound remain to be seen, and give us something to look forward to.
Comments