Journeys to the Interior

As different as they are in genre and approach, these four recent books find common ground, placing individual experience in an expansive web of human generations, natural imperatives, and cultural expression. All four books constitute internal and external journeys across “territories” both physical and imagined. Mary K. Stillwell looks at how families shape and reshape the stories that in turn shape them, while the editors of These Living Songs trace influences across poetic generations, revealing connections and nurturing the state of Montana’s “family” of poets. Melissa Kwasny and Christopher Cokinos place their own perceptions in even more expansive archeological and cosmological contexts.

As its title suggests, Mary K. Stillwell’s Maps & Destinations is the work that most ostensibly addresses themes of travel and displacement. The poems move from the American Midwest to North Africa to Latin America, sometimes blending settings, as in “In the Morning in Morocco,” or, as in “The Little Street,” situating the poem between outward reality and “environments” imagined and realized through art, in this case Vermeer’s painting referred to in the poem’s title. For Stillwell the past is unstable and recursive. A series of poems reconstructs the speaker’s father, who, in “Some Things I Kept to Myself for a While,” “placed the gun / between his lips and pulled the trigger,” only to be resurrected, appearing “at her door, back from the dead, smiling” (33). Seen from the position of the present, the past fades in two mutually exclusive directions, much as the future does in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Stillwell further complicates the family story, in a poem of that title, by recreating the father’s suicide as the murder/suicide of his own parents. Generations also overlap in “My Mother’s Wedding,” “My Daughter’s Wedding,” and “My Wedding,” the bride figure melding with the statue of the Madonna, itself transformed into “My Lady of Nebraska” who “is earth and sky, / plant and animal, birth and death / sun and moon, flower and weed” (70). As with other poems in the collection, numbered stanzas present an illusion of orderly linear progression, belied here by the unchronological placement of the poems and by the poems’ tendency to resist narrative continuity.

Melissa Kwasny’s Pictograph extends both interior vision and artistic history into the millennia-long chronicle delineated by rock art. These prose poems, framed with full justification, work their way inside the minds of pre-Columbian painters and carvers, even perhaps into the “life” of the individual artwork itself. In keeping with Kwasny’s previous work, the poems are philosophical, rich in allusion and metaphor, but the ancient artworks, complete with at least after-the-fact designators, are no less particular than the paintings in Stillwell’s ekphrastic poems. Kwasny burrows deep into rock crevices and shamanic caverns, the poems’ compact claustrophobia relieved as the present moment expands into the vastness of pre-history. Kwasny understands that forces of destructive transformation convert thriving societies into archeological remnants, and she acknowledges the particular destructiveness of our time: “The bats have their holocaust in their Vermont caves. The pines die from pine beetles on our slopes” (“The Wounded Bird” 38). At times Kwasny’s natural history seems a bit eccentric, as in the assertion that “Buffalo . . . mate for life, not like the deer, who are flighty and promiscuous,” but this, her speaker asserts, constitutes an example that “women were taught to emulate” (“The Ground, Which Is Only Heavy Wind” 51), entangling nature, once again, with cultural impression.

Despite the lyrical intensity of these poems, Kwasny, like Still-well, is not without a capacity for wry humor. While Stillwell’s speaker worries about the potential embarrassment of a plane crash—“As I sat on the toilet / of a Boeing 727” (“Travel Plans” 54)—envisioning a struggle to restore pants and final dignity while somersaulting through the air, Kwasny’s humor takes the form of incisive, ambiguous...