Echoes of Life

When so many people say that life is short, which tends to feel true—when thinking about youth and age—Seibles suggests that life is long. If we’re lucky, we get to do a lot: be a lot. We get to experience so many first times, and then we get to seek that first-time feeling again and again. Many of these poems carefully look back. “Terry Moore” traces an entire life of learning what a relationship is: what life is. People tend to believe in goodness—where would we be if that weren’t the default? But sometimes it’s the lessons in misunderstanding and fear that make us who we are. Willing to learn and forgive and grow, or not. “Dawn” spells this out, too.

Or the giving up on everything, the world a banquet of good reasons for clocking out and chomping the black sandwich. But I thought but

there’s so much I want to do, so much I need to say, so much, so much, somothafuckin’ much and Fuck Death!

We should never be finished learning. There’s such beautiful frustration in the realization that, when we think we know quite a bit, we’ve spent a lifetime just discovering where to begin.

Seibles uses italics, white space, and line breaks in ways that make these poems an audio experience. If you’re not drawn to literally read them to yourself aloud, you’re at least thinking about the emphasis. You’re thinking about the sounds of the words and how you’d say them and how other people would say them. There’s attitude here, and humanity.

As Seibles deconstructs his own identity—or, identity in general—he proves that we learn a set of rules and lessons, and then spend the rest of our lives relearning, experiencing, and practicing. Our lives are such echoes. So many villanelles. Our lives are villanelles: repetitions, but slightly different situations—slightly different stanzas. “Allison Wolff” is packed with these lessons: race and what it feels like to recall the fearlessness of youth.

Autumn, 1972: Race was the elephant

sitting on everybody. Even as a teenager, I took the weight as part of the weather, a sort of heavy humidity felt inside and in the streets.

He’s giving scenes that sum up history: markers through interaction. That’s power.

Seibles has you absolutely longing for pieces of your own past; even if the loss of your virginity was nothing like “Donna James,” suddenly, you share that exact day. You want that to be your day. And then you realize that Seibles isn’t just reliving that day, he’s forcing us to think about which is better: the precise experience—the present tense—or the looking back—the memory as restored through recollection, with the choice to omit certain things. Experience vs. Memory. He seems to suggest that life is a balance of the two. We keep making mistakes—maybe the same mistakes—over and over, but we also have successes. Without the ability to recall these things, how could we really push on? “The Last Poem about Race” sort of pokes fun at the very concept of progress. Sure, we’re moving forward, but if we ever stop writing poems about the past, about the experiences that have shaped us—good and bad—then we might as well call it quits, in general.

The book is dedicated to Gil Scott Heron, the great jazz-soul-poet-musician, and the author Lillian Smith. If those two don’t cry revolution, no one does. But unlike what some contemporary revolutions have turned into (masked realities of selfishness), Seibles (like Gil Scott-Heron and Lillian Smith) seems genuine in his plea for self-examination. Nothing for show; nothing congratulatory; just a genuine mirror.

No matter what, the light still burns: in a mirror they see what they need to see I find this anger shaped like a man—as if I stood with the night climbing my back, as if my human self were better

forgotten...