Cecily Parks’ Loose Ends

by Weston Cutter

 

Field Folly Snow is not perfect. In fact, the late poems of this book hang like streamers from a solid center. The center is essentially Cecily Parks’ 2005 chapbook Cold Work, a work which won the Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship, and these poems are the most carefully crafted, the most controlled and the most compelling in Field Folly Snow. Still, the book is my favorite in a stack of recent debut collections, and its success comes not in spite of the looser, hanging parts, but because of them.

 

The book begins with poems whose speakers are deeply connected to nature—the speaker of “I Lost My Horse” who “looked for the horse because she looked/ safe enough to love”; the speaker of “Self-Portrait as a Rain Gauge” who considers that her “lot is split precipitate/ around a measuring stick and swallowing”; the speaker in “The Minister’s Bad Wayward Girl” and her desire to “be gardened….tamped down” like soil. The poems are individually compelling but their real contribution to the collection is in the way they depict a world of man and nature intertwined, creating a foundation for the poems that follow them.

 

By the book’s second section, each page seems to speak to the next in a richly rewarding way. “Dear William, the Cottonwoods are Letting Go” combines Parks’ interest in language and sound with honest, human emotion. I feel this poem much more than any that proceeds it, and I am simultaneously captivated by its vocabularly, a union of scientific and the sensory language from the very start:

           

                        As they ought to.

Catkin, bit

 

of cotton. Each

rib spindly,

 

astral, petal,

auroral, arboreal.

 

Aural, oral

fluff. Falling

 

While the poem does not clarify the nature of the relationship between the speaker and William, the final line, the likening of the cottonwood’s strewn seeds to “A warm snow” poignantly depicts the conflicted feelings of a speaker (perhaps a lover, a parent, a sibling, a friend) who both longs for William and accepts his absence.

 

Other poems in this second section feel similarly personal, each speaker desperate to say something and to say it honestly. Some are narrative, some epistolary or in direct address to a subject, and they are the richest of the collection for many reasons, one of which is the ways the poems function as a group to describe a particular kind of life, a life lived with keen awareness of and reliance on the natural world, as described in the opening lines of “Trapline”: “The landscape holds you in no clouded thrall/ but holds you nonetheless.”

 

While this sense of the landscape holding the characters of Parks’ poems persists throughout the book, I am most impressed by this debut poet’s willingness to leave loose ends. Toward the end of the collection the poems become more frantic, more scattered, and brackets are used to section off blank space, shrugging off the kind of precision of language, the absolutes of image that come before. By the final piece, “Tecumseh and Ulysses and How Were Those for Names,” definitive characters and their emotions seem less important than the words and their sounds. It is a sort of linguistic puzzle that seems vastly different from “Dear William, the Cottonwoods are Letting Go,” though both poems show a keen interest in language. And yet, there’s an undertone of urgency here, an imprecise but compelling desire on the part of the speaker. It’s the ebb and flow of meaning in this collection, the specific set against the less defined, that makes this collection feel teased out emotionally and, in a word, whole. Field Folly Snow feels complete in a way that so many of the more cautious, more chiseled debut collections do not.

 

(This post was written by guest reviewer Carrie Meadows, whose writing we will all, if there’s justice in the publishing world, be reading much more of very soon)

 

Fifteen Years of 14 Songs

by Weston Cutter

Of the half-dozen or so real singular things that seem, to me, classically Minnesotan—state fair, birthplace of the DFL, almost hilariously great publishing and bookstores, scrappy/underdog baseball—the thing I’m most drawn to, of course, is music. It’s easy to make lists that make the cold, weird 32nd state seem like some freakish something’s-in-the-water type place: Dylan, Prince, the Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum (they were good early), the Jayhawks, Mason Jennings, Atmosphere (and the rest of the Rhymesayer collective)(that new Atmosphere is insanely good, just in case you haven’t gotten it), Haley Bonar (who might be the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen a picture of, and whose “Big Star” makes me just fucking sizzle). Etc.

The line I’ve heard that I think makes the most sense is that it’s so damned cold in MN in the winter that there’s nothing else to do but practice and play music, and then, when it finally gets warm, all the bands come out and play. What’s funny about that line is that I heard it so long ago it doesn’t even matter whether it’s true or not: I believe it’s true, and (I think) I hear MN music differently because of it (not, like, I listen to music differently from how others listen to music, but I listen to stuff expecting to hear the we’re-stuck-inside-ness of it. If you think that’s nuts I defy you to listen to Jack Johnson and the Replacements back to back and then tell me which sounds like Hawaii and which sounds like MN).

Because it’s recently gotten warm enough to really believe in summer as something other than sham, I’m finding myself pulling out old summer CDs—discs that’ve, forever, meant the start of summer (I know I’m not alone in having something like seasonal music taste). There are a few great ones, all Minnesotan, that do it for me—the Jayhawks Tomorrow the Green Grass and Sound of Lies, Mason Jenning’s self-titled debut—but the one that always, always hits me hardest and marks the start of the season is Paul Westerberg’s 14 Songs.

 

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Sarah Manguso

by Weston Cutter

 

Sarah Manguso’s now released a book of fiction, two of poetry, and, on May 27th from FSG, her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay. You are (for now) forgiven if you don’t know who she is: two books of poetry do not, from what I can tell, offer many writers something as tough to come by as name recognition. Her book of fiction, Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape is one of the three books that came included in 145 Stories in a Small Box, published by (who else) McSweeney’s (there are more than 145 stories in the box, for the record)(the other two books are by Eggers and Deb Olin Unferth (whose next book is coming from McSweeney’s this fall) and yes, all three books are fantastic, and yes, the set’s worth your money). All of which is just to say: Manguso’s arriving, meaning now, meaning perk up, buy her books, read her and pay attention.

The Two Kinds of Decay is a memoir of what seems to me one of the most fucking brutally nasty diseases ever, a rare, chronic form of Guillain-Barre syndrome called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. I am, for good or bad, squeamish: I get icked out quickly, and I squirm at even physical description of body/health related stuff, and so I cannot say for sure what Guillain-Barre or the CIDP form does to the body, not in any detail. Manguso went from feeling a little bad to not being able to breathe (well or deeply) to not being able to move (much at all), and to discover the malady doctors prodded the shit out of her took tests and ran blood from her body through a machine which removed her platelets and eventually stuck a main line directly into one of her arteries so they (doctors) could take blood whenever they wanted and even writing that now, weeks after reading it, makes me get goosebumpy.

But the just knock-you-on-your-ass part about Manguso’s writing is how unbelievably scrubbed and tough the words are. It’s weird, but the sentence I want to write is that there’s no self-pity in the whole book, and while that’s certainly true, it’s hard to even comprehend the feat of mental strength that’d require. It’s not even worth speculating on whether or not Manguso had why me moments throughout her entire time with this disease (which, by the way, destroyed much of her twenties, and which is incurable, meaning she’s in remission), what’s devastating is her ability to look so coolly at her own life and body and report not even from the frontline, but from within the frontline.

Though there’s a Didion-esque sort of objectivity to Manguso’s writing, there are moments of gut-wrenching, real basic human stuff that just floors you and jolts you to the realization that, yes, you’re reading about a body that went through an atrocious, hideous thing, but you’re also very much reading about a human being, a life. It sounds stupid to write it like that, or it feels stupid anyway: we sort of know this stuff, intellectually, but when you get to, for instance, the moment in the book in which Manguso describes one of her nurses marking on a form that Manguso’s color is naturally pale (the details of the scene are not easily compressible, plus just read the book—it’s page 78-79), a moment of real basic person-to-person generosity and connection, it’s enough to make you weep. No joke at all.

Manguso’s sentences are compact and scarily shining, and the structure of the book fits her writing perfectly. Chapters are short—a few paragraphs to a handful of pages—and the chapters are blocks of text, independent, disconnected. What’s most incredible, I think, about the structure is how Manguso basically allows/forces the reader to connect the text her- or himself, and how that feeling of agency brings (I think) the reader in incredibly closely to a story she/he/(very much I) might otherwise try to keep some distance from.

This book’s gonna/should get rapturous praise, and, yes, it’ll deserve every word. It’s a demanding book, and it’ll (likely) make you physically uncomfortable. Much more important is that the book’s astoundingly beautifully written and is almost freakishly wise and has more guts and heart than any other two dozen books I can think of off the top of my head. Read it and, if you’re the sort of person who does this stuff, pray for Manguso and for readers: that she stays well and that she keeps writing and that we get to keep reading.