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  • Storm-Tossed Poems
  • Lem Coley (bio)
Surge
Michelle Whittaker
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www.greatweatherformedia.com/michelle-whittaker-surge
90 Pages; Print, $17.00

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Surge is Michelle Whittaker's first book, but "Process," the closing number, debuted in the New Yorker, and "Turned Away from 30 Hospitals in 2 Hours" made the New York Times Sunday Magazine in July—with a more decorous title—picked by National Book Award winner Terence Hayes. This after readings and publications, Pushcart Prize mention, fellowship from Cave Canem . . . . In short, there is a sense of gathering momentum.

The poetry is ambitious, though unpretentious, and mildly intimidating in its difficulty—many dots left unconnected. But people say the younger poets have wearied (finally) of narrative memoir, that reliable jar of emotional cookies. I've seen this millennial style called "associative," or "elliptical;" I call Whittaker's work old school modernism.

How old? Old enough to give each storm-tossed poem a surging texture—of anger long held back, grief splintered into fragments and spliced in with ideas, all modulated by a wit that lets her retain control.

Wit is shorthand for a great deal: ellipsis, "The memory of my is like . . . ," syntactic play, unexpected images—there's nothing this book won't employ as an image—and new verbs—" . . . she would bandanna the soft-/ boiled egg beneath the tablecloth." "Their voices tourist along the coast." "I wish I could acupuncture your sabbatical." Every poem carries a linguistic surprise.

Done for itself, this is entertainment. Put to work here, it contributes to the now-you-see-me-now-you-don't of a Whittaker poem.

Thus the style is flexible and unpredictable, but e pluribus unum, a motto she tests by starting off with collage, "A Partial Cento of Visible Light," recalling the senior gravestones in the modernist cemetery, and the newest, John Ashberry. I wondered if beginning with a cento suggested ego abnegation or an homage to influences, but a voice comes through, herding the lines of others into a notice of arrival: "Here I am now, without you, looking around . . . " and the poem ends, "is a daughter, without children, / seeing the light, forming, seeing."

The book has three divisions. The first, "In the Afterlife," circles around loss—the death of a lover, and perhaps a failure to bear children. In the title poem, memory pictures "spasm" but absence and deletion dominate—"But if only I'd formed the letters into the words of a letter / a day sooner a day sooner than the brain understood a day sooner." An image of a boiling gladiolus bulb, suggesting rebirth, the buried god rising, closes the poem.

"Blank Canvas" looks stoically for fading recollections: "The more I search for him / the more distant" and finishes memorably, "What we look like: " with only blank space after the colon.

A brilliant poem, "After the Funeral," guides us through cordgrass (spartina) taking clear verbal snapshots of the littoral detritus—fragments of a rotting bird, a kayak skeleton, a "vacant blanket," two sand tombs, a stick drawn heart shape with a woman's name. At the end a small boat "stutters into parts of what's darkening." Image of a departing soul?

This poem could easily have been a narrative memoir. An hour, a day, a week after a lover's funeral, the bereft walks along the shore as darkness falls. But here, cut to the pith, without the narrative baggage, the strain to achieve authentic emotion, or the framing of a personality, the poem draws power to itself, the great invisible matter swelling up like storm clouds behind the slender words describing insignificant items well on their way to decomposition, some—a heart shape, a "vacant blanket"—evoking love and loss.

Family is the contested field of Part II, "Surge." When the urge to speak bitterness meets a pull towards reticence, stress occurs. Not that secrets are withheld to appease bourgeois convention—the tension forms between a need to settle scores and a need to transcend. The poet rejects the stock figures of the accuser or maternal conciliator. Some may find this evasive, muddy. For me it unlocks, makes...

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