The Terrain Between

Andrea Scarpino writes in her poem “With Lines from Nâzim Hikmet:”

This earth will grow cold, Hikmet said. Will roll along / in pitch-black space. Once there was a father, daughter, ground for silver leaves, air for sparrow flight. Flowers opened recklessly. Then there was a grave.

We reach for poetry by classic authors like Nâzim Hikmet in times of grief and uncertainty. The act of reading doesn’t necessarily bring us comfort or even distract us from the tragedy at hand, but it lets us feel more connected to our collective human memory. It’s mysterious why poetry has that effect; we’re simply reading a seemingly haphazard constellation of images and abstractions communicated to us in the idiolect of a particular person who happens to be a poet. Yet poetry can help us deal with transience and death, possibly because it can pick up where faith falters. In many ways, Scarpino’s debut collection Once, Then is not just a collection of elegies, but rather a meditation on the links between poetry and grief, poetry and disaster. The author dedicates the book to the two people she lost: her father, microbiologist Pasquale Scarpino, and Gracie Jones, a close friend’s child. But while Scarpino’s poems lament the death of loved ones and commemorate them in verse, these same poems also extend loss and grief into large questions that trouble the living. What are the limits of science? Of religion? Of art? What do we do with this split between the body and the mind, and our multiple subjectivities?

While searching for answers, Scarpino often uses the form of lyric dictionary entries. In the poem “Rigor Mortis,” we find the speaker processing the reality (and perhaps distancing herself from it) as the poem opens and closes with the phrase “As in,” a common device in dictionary entries when a definition requires further explanation. She writes: “As in thorough, difficult, / severe. As in your chest… / / As in hardship. As in / the body, strict, bereft.” Using the same technique in the opening poem “Stone Work,” the speaker lists signifiers associated with “stone,” from the carefree “as in skipping” to the biblical “cast the first” and finally “to death.” At the center of “Stone Work” is an image from the evening news that might come to symbolize the violence of the early twenty-first century: “another beheading, a woman // this time.” Along with references to the current news, mythical characters and historic traumas from the more or less distant past also populate the book: Persephone, Madonna, Achilles, Hiroshima, and Holocaust. Scarpino’s elegiac lyric is as expansive as the genre should be, while maintaining the power to move the reader.

Each of the three sections of the book is anchored by at least one sijo, a lyric form originating in Medieval Korea. The long lines of the Korean tercet (each one containing several short phrases) provide room for both a central image and a narrative element, all the while preserving overall brevity of the form. As such, Scarpino’s sijos easily blend with her dominant lyric narrative mode. Scarpino’s staccato syntax also finds a fitting home in sijo’s play with caesurae, as exemplified by the powerful “Funeral Sijo,”

Your hands are hollow things, your eyes.   Among the trees, a bird with stripes of blue. The redwoods,   love, the wind, the ache of branches as they sway. I walk away. The   bird, love, calls.

The speaker clings to the beauty of nature, simultaneously fleeting and permanent when compared to the tiny scale of the human lifespan. But “Funeral Sijo” demonstrates another interesting choice Scarpino makes, which is to deliberately open to interpretation whether a given “you” refers to her father or her friend’s daughter. At times it seems like a collective “you.” Such moments abound in Scarpino’s other poems, not just in her sijos, and this ambiguity is explicitly confirmed in “Grace:” “Once you were a daughter, // father, friend.”

Scarpino doesn’t aim to innovate or radically redefine the lyric. In fact, a reoccurring...