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Reviewed by:
  • Talking Underwater
  • Theresa Burns (bio)
Sally Bliumis-Dunn. Talking Underwater. Wind Publications.

Reading Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s first collection of poems, Talking Underwater, is a little like clicking the “zoom in” button on dozens of scenes that even the most observant among us would normally pass by, or step over, in an average day without remarking on. She writes exquisite nature poems, but if that makes you think of the armchair variety that fill countless literary journals and tend to make the eyelids heavy, get ready for something altogether different.

Bliumis-Dunn’s specialty is the close-up, the cellular even. Her poems are rooted unhesitatingly and refreshingly in the physical detail, and, as such, she understands that they need no imbuing with metaphysical meaning, that meaning is inherent in the physical, and that it is not only enough, it is sublime. Her terse lines, often holding no more than two or three words, and her unusual line breaks, often falling between adjective and noun, force the reader to slow down and focus with her own patient [End Page 203] intensity. In the almost minimalistic poem “Butterfly,” the physicality of the moment she describes is magnified as both speaker and reader watch transfixed:

Touched, a fine orange and black powder coated my fingertips;

and where I had fingered the wing, the orange and black were smudged,

and the tip, the very tip of the wing was transparent and pale as rain.

In other mostly short lyrics, Bliumis-Dunn steadies her gaze on familiar protagonists of the natural world—tree, animal, shell, moon, insect, and, yes, many kinds of water—but often with surprising results. Nothing is static here; everything is moving, growing, or disintegrating. The book is filled with updrafts, leaves floating and falling, a river running cold over rocks flecked with mica. Nor does she turn away from the landscape, both inner and outer, of our human bodies and what disturbances are wrought there by change, especially the passing of youth and the arrival and departure of other humans. In “Where We Go,” liver spots on an old woman’s skin are the shadows of “whatever floats on the surface / of the world above this life.” It is hard to write poetry about old ladies without getting mired in either sentimentality or condescension, but in several delicately rendered poems, including “Auntie Kaye” and “Meaning,” Bliumis-Dunn does just that. How rare for a poet to write a poem about a mother whose subject is, in fact, the mother.

The poems in the last section of the book navigate with similar deftness such adult minefields as love, divorce, daughters leaving for college, and even weddings. As in her nature poems, their significance to the author seems to be found in the space between emotions, the joinings and hingings, but also in the unbridgeable gaps and contradictions that define relationship. In “Angie, Leaving” she describes the intersection of pride and despair a mother feels as her daughter packs for college, nailing the ambivalence, even while remaining grounded in the physical, in nature:

Isn’t it always like this— joy and sorrow calling to each other across an open field?

How strange the heart’s equivalents— [End Page 204] she is leaving: it is snowing.

This is a substantial collection for a first book, at more than one hundred pages, and a more aggressive editor may have left out a bit more. “Rain,” for example, does not stand up to the level of the other outstanding nature poems here. And why include a second, weaker daughter-leaving-for-college poem when the first fully satisfied and charmed the reader? But the missteps here are few and the rewards complex and abundant in this promising poet’s debut.

Theresa Burns

Theresa M. Burns, a long-time book editor, holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems and reviews have appeared in the Women’s Review of Books, Global City Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Lumina Magazine, among other publications. She is the author of the chapbook The Quickening and teaches writing at Seton Hall University and the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. She lives in New Jersey...

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