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Reviewed by:
  • Sycamore by Kathy Fagan
  • Walter Holland
Kathy Fagan. Sycamore. Milkweed Editions, 2017.

Sycamore is as adept and fine a poetry collection as one can find on the contemporary scene. Fagan is a master of word play, line breaks, and the sonic elements of the lyric form. If the collection is cryptic, nonlinear, and elliptical, it is also rigorously crafted, inventive and imaginative. Fagan composes, by her own admission in an interview with John Hoppenthaler in the Connotation Press, by playing with:

small scraps and miniatures, to make little tableaux and collages; that comes naturally to me. I’m a gatherer, a non-linear thinker; poetry is traditionally very capacious, open to juxtaposition, opposition, and elliptical thoughts.

She goes on to say in the interview:

. . .When I work my attention is given over entirely to the syllable, the sound, the phrase, the image, the line, the sentence, the shape, the associations, and the interiors revealed to me though an openness to all of these.

Fagan reveals as well that she is “very interested in aesthetics and form as ideas.” This aestheticism is quite evident in her work and reminds me of another poetical practitioner, namely Wallace Stevens. Fagan’s highly advanced skill and craft is founded on a range of experiences. As Fagan confesses:

I’ve written in rhyme, traditional forms, prose, long lines, short lines, measured lines, and syllabics; in lyric and narrative modes and modes I have no names for; in my own voice and in many personae; in dictions high and low and in between.

Thematically, much of the work in this book evokes the pastoral. There is such ease and finesse of language and such attention to words and imagery. There is also great mystery. In “Black Walnuts,” Fagan opens with: [End Page 29]

Their cases fall, Split & whole, in the cemetery grass, With no one to see them. Sulphuric green & Naugahyde, the fruit rock hard inside, They stink out loud, with no one to smell them.

It is the season of separation & falling Way. Sycamore bark tears off in sheets, But I won’t be writing on them— They prefer to roll, Empty, on either side of the river.

The poem goes on to describe the river as:

. . . less like a horse or time than I am, A fissure that fills & empties without comment. It may flirt with the weather, turn pretty or brooding Under a gaze, but it splits east & west just the same, Keeping each for itself. . .

This close visual fixity and miniature detail haunts Fagan’s collection. The pastoral is found as well in a poem such as “Elelendish” (the archaic word for foreign or foreigner):

The palazzo di Maia flushed coral at dusk, blossom of rosy chocolate, bowl of oxblood bloom.

When dusk falls in Godthäb, now known as Nuuk, reindeer lick the fawns clean, eat placenta off snow,

the tundra spotted with birth each May, with spring lichen and low, red cabins, like flowering quince . . .

In her own words, Fagan suggests the poem:

. . . strives to imagine birth, heat, spring, and other life-giving elements in an environment that might be considered hostile, even antithetical to them. The lush and familiar, if fabular, “palazzo di Maia” is set in opposition to the wild and unknown, if equally fabular, frozen north [in this case Greenland].

The pastoral, however, is only one characteristic in Fagan’s complex mastery of theme and form. Compositionally, her poems are highly intricate and nuanced; her associations and use of repetition opening the reader to entire realms of cultural, historical and environmental thought.

There is levity, too. In “Stride” Fagan captures the mundanity of being in a gym on a treadmill:

Mediterranean teal crosses the lap pool in German

rectangles of Ohio sun. Up above, my stride on

the treadmill is far too long—Michael’s moonwalk, fan

full in my face. . .

Her exquisite line breaks go without saying and add to the general humor of the poem, which ends up surprisingly with a remembered moment with a lover on a European sojourn.

There is a sensuality and eroticism, which also appears in Fagan’s work. Case in point, a work such as “Cottonwood.” Here I...

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