Slim Girth

A perspective riven by the impossibility of reconciling landscape and portrait views of a life: this simultaneous half-seeing and more-than-wholeness characterizes the way in which Farrah Field finds meaning in her first published collection, Rising. The figure we view most often through the memory of the poetic speaker of this book is the poet's sister, Heather, murdered by her husband at least nine years before Rising's publication ("Deader than before, my sister is nine years dead," the speaker says in the poem "April"). The background of the poems is the rural South, specifically Arkansas and Louisiana. But what keeps the collection honest is the failure of the background either to lie flat, or to take over and dominate with objectionable Southern "corn pone" clichés, as it does in so much contemporary literature set in the South. The "background" of Field's poems is not landscape but the material manifestations of emotions themselves, in "Not despair but worse— / rumpled paper in a corner, checked items on a list." Her sister, "Heather Field," is a verbal embodiment of the inhabiting of a figure by the ground, "the heather field." In "The Telling," the speaker says,

                Eyes redden.The newspaper's words: "Heather Field,""husband" and "murder-suicide."The telling has its own rhythm.

What keeps the sister present to the reader is not a description of the sister or her life but a vivid account of the speaker's refusal to let go, to mourn the loss of her loved one.

Because Rising is so focused, differences in quality between individual poems are not apparent. Rather, the best poems provide the collection's intensity, while the other poems support them beautifully, allowing breathing room. One of the highlights of the collection is "The Disturbed Mississippi," which testifies to the sometimes life-giving history of floods:

                          The river'sesoteric teachings,            witness to the before day when itsrises and spills formed Louisiana in some    kind Genesis,

that land was carried and is walked upon.

The line and stanza breaks evoke the falling and continuing movements of floodwaters seen in this moment not as the taker of life, but as abundance itself. Yet Field has already indicated the human toll of the river, in the "peach woman" who may one day "wait on her roof for a boat to come by." While Field writes at the end of "Louisiana Phone Call," "Everyone who can think has a weapon," in the whole collection the reader gets the sense that Rising is the result of an extended and serious contemplation of the weapons created by the mind, and the pursuit of disarmament.

Terese Svoboda has no such aim in her new book of poems, titled Weapons Grade. This collection seems almost too wildly varied to be gathered together: perhaps it should be called a "bundle" of poems. There are four sections in the book: the first, fierce, historically obsessed section is the best. In it, we see a poem that takes for its epigram a puerile comment by Barbara Bush on Good Morning America in March 2003. The poem lives up to this epigrammatic demand for a response to Bush's dismissal of the unpleasant thought of body bags; the entire poem is one stern rebuke, difficult to excerpt, although these lines are outstanding:

guests, not people you would live with, guests not people you would talk too much to, just How can you help me? these guests are already dead but you can't tell as they back out of the back room with love

on their lips....

Another high point of the collection is "Aphra Plays," the fantastical riff on the life and work of the seventeenth-century British woman playwright (and spy) Aphra Behn. This piece actually sits at the very beginning of the second section, but the commitment to history that drives the first section seems to hold over for a few poems. The poem is written...