Violent Violets

The Irish-born novelist Iris Murdoch wrote that the direction of attention is constantly outward, away from the self, which has a tendency to reduce all things to a false unity. What is required then is an attention toward the great variety of the world, and Murdoch suggests that the ability to direct such attention is love.

In Circadian, her second full-length poetry collection, Joanna Klink's direction of attention is characterized most accurately by its range, precision, profundity, and the idiomatic subtleties of the book's urgent vision.

Klink's world is not a landscape marshaled by the external witness-turned-reflective (a landscape best observed through field glasses) but rather a vast sea into which—even with all her faculties—poet and reader are afforded only partial entry. And it is partial because the voice in her poems is ever-investigatory as it considers the depth of its own appreciation of the world:

            I have fought

hard to see, have tried to find some wayaround this...the world loved and not loved, two fishglinting dark-gold beneath the blurred river

surface—have I loved it enough....

Alternately, Circadian's gift is its ability to illuminate the "landscape beyond us," the "pure periphery, cast into the immobile black," as well as the speaking distance between two people, above which "a single star [is] streaking in cracked silence." This is true, in part, because of her ability to describe scenarios in which she attempts to imagine alternative outcomes, as in the poem "Antelope":

            What were our hopes

when we first heard that it broke...            ...their bodies ghosted

where our minds would have them stall....

Klink heightens the sense of hurt when we learn of the antelope's ultimate fate, an outcome which urges readers into the responsibility of attention while also warning us that once we open our eyes, we are no longer able to choose the depth in which we will be engaged; the light simply fills them, and we are forced to abandon any measure of how much pain we might witness.

In "Terrarium," one of the most somber poems in the collection, Klink deliberately complicates the boundaries between the speaker's interior landscape and the physical landscape. The speaker's ability to "sense the hinge the field / spacious nowhere torn by violets" invites the reading "torn by violence." The remainder of the poem suggests the speaker's sympathy toward an exterior wilderness (which eventually feeds the speaker's interior wilderness) that is at risk of being "mechanically" or unnaturally contained. On her part, this is like an act of sympathy that ultimately underwrites the activities of the senses, particularly vision. And through this sympathy, the speaker concludes that she must press against

vast borders stitchedto the disappearing treesa place I love so muchblurred animal at the edge...I have waiteduninjured as the otherswere injured do you notanswer me I answer you.

And when speaker and reader hear no answer, we realize that if Klink's poems are made of perception, the risk they take is how to convey lamentation for that in the natural world which has been lost or is on the verge of being lost, rather than merely a semblance of lamentation. Klink gives her attention to how the mind reacts to what the eyes have witnessed, thereby exacting perception through the act of witnessing and thus creating a feedback loop that is sustained throughout the composition of the entire collection.

This is a loop that also contributes to Klink's ability to incorporate the most subtle of sound patterns, which throughout Circadian, belie predictable calculation by providing readers with a rhythm that does more than simply mimic the movement of water (in all of its forms) and other natural cycles, but allows us to experience moments of brilliant clarity when vision and sound work in concert so that "Each thing [is] made in the moment we hear." (9)

In "Whoever Like You and All Doves" she writes,

Nothing I have seen on earthis so lost as...