Burn (review)

Sandra Meek has always been interested in oxymoron and paradox, as the titles of her first two books of poems, The Circumference of Arrival (2001) and Nomadic Foundations (2002), show.

The title of her third and most ambitious and resonant book—Burn—is ostensibly unambiguous. But the book's poems are another matter. Here, as in her previous books, she explores, in varied configurations, the relationship between objects and their opposites, ideas and their antitheses.

In the book's most ambitious poem—the fifteen-page "A Short History of Flight"—we're offered several points of view on the topic of flight.

Quotations from astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, Civil War General James Longstreet and inventors-of-the-airplane Orville and Wilbur Wright, as well as others, are mixed with the poet's voice, which serves to both amplify these other voices and to ground them.

As always, Meek is attuned to duality. Flight isn't only about going up. She writes, "If time is relative and burns/two directions, these houses going up are their own/bombed-out remains . . ."

The subjects who speak in the poem also grapple with the dark side of whatever it is they're speaking of. Orville Wright is quoted asking someone, most likely his brother, how he felt about the airplane being used as an instrument of "wholesale destruction and human slaughter." Wilbur replies, "I feel about airplanes much as I do in regard to fire. That is, I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire. But I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires . . ."

Glenn, Carpenter and the other Mercury Astronauts certainly understood how their magnificent exploration, their chance to soar to heights no human had ever reached, always contained within it the possibility of instant extinction, the end of all travels. So-called progress, as the poem illustrates, is never an unqualified good. Scientific advancements can lead to the possibility of nuclear devastation.

Naturally, the poem ends with a paradox: "Quartered light where a moth, newly/unfolded, batters ashen wings against brick:/all the world an exit, and no passage out."

A review of Burn could focus solely on "A Short History of Flight" and fail to capture everything it contains—it's this complex, this worthy of reflection. But all twenty-seven poems in Burn offer rewards. A favorite of this reviewer's is "A Short History of Burn, from the OED," a hypnotic list of definitions. One can imagine the poet concluding a reading with this poem, which has the momentum of an airplane rushing down the runway on its way to takeoff: "Of the passions;/Of a battle;/Of fire, a furnace, or conflagration . . ."

Although "Reentering Atmosphere" is the first poem in the book, the title poem, which comes second, seems the better introduction, given its early evocation of space exploration ("1969, the television flickering its aquariumed astronaut") and its ending, an oxymoron ("sacred transgres-sion"). "Balancing Act," too, is a prototypical poem, with its discussion of "marrying creation and destruction."

What distinguishes the poems in Burn is their intelligence, their waste-no- words intensity and, especially with "A Short History of Flight," their laudable ambition. Although the poems are suffused with the philosophical concerns of the poet, and contain within them a suggestion of the poet's inner life, a reader might on occasion pine for an explicitly autobiographical work that remains grounded in images instead of lifting off into abstraction.

In "Epitaph, in Process," for example, the speaker addresses someone who appears to be hospitalized. But after a small, effective portrait—". . . half of your body turned/toward recovery, trailing/its IV, one half curved/into January wind to keep from dying . . ."—the poet gives us "pentatonic night" and "the architecture of flight." (After this, we're treated to the poignant image of the person the speaker is addressing "..sifting through sale racks/of prosthetic breasts, unrecalling/the route home . . .")

Like the subjects they address, the poems in Burn push the edge of the envelope. To be understood and appreciated, most of them require...