Some Say the Lark by Jennifer Chang (review)

"So!—to declare certitude. // So?—to not care. // And so much to not care about!" writes Jennifer Chang in the poem "Myself—Be Noon to Him" from her second collection Some Say the Lark. Throughout the book, Chang surprises the reader with similarly stark language play. "Look at all the subtle ways we communicate," she seems to be saying. "And yet how little of each other we fathom."

Some Say the Lark revels in exploring the complexity of what might appear, on the surface, as simple. Life, in this book, is not a division of joy and misery, of illness and health, of then and now—all sensations occur simultaneously, all individuals are part of the whole.

Chang's title seems, at first, to dispute this idea, as it references Juliet mis-representing a lark's song as a nightingale's in Act III, Scene V of Romeo and Juliet. But, as Chang points out in her endnotes, Juliet willfully misnames the songbird, wishing to pretend it is still night so Romeo will stay with her. Mistakes and misinterpretations, this book tells us, are of our own design.

The thwarted quatrains of the poem "Lost Child" show this commentary at work, wherein Chang writes:

       "… Fear lightsmy eyes, and I blink, a self-enforceddetachment that self-soothes. I waslonely, had no one

to sit on the bus or eat lunch with,and even then I knew I'd fail atthe most basic things. D+ in HumanPhysiology, a first

marriage I didn't intend, ordinaryconfessions pouring out as soon asmy lips kissed a cold rim of gin.…"

The repetition of compound "self" words in the first stanza creates a paradoxical confession: why would one engage in self-enforced detachment? And the word detachment—so jittery—here parallels the concept of self-soothing. Chang's speaker is assessing both the self and circumstance here, showing that what is done to us we often end up doing to ourselves, in order to avoid the shock of external damage. Self-inflicted damage can seem less torrential, if only because we know when to expect it.

Here, we move rapidly through the speaker's failures. These are presented not as sequential but as concurrent and constant. Later in the same poem, Chang ultimately wonders "… if any end / could be tolerable." A major triumph of this book lies in the response to her questioning of how we can see more clearly how longing turns to hope. She asserts that all things are equal in a lifetime, that joy and failure and longing move together all the time, even if they could not be said to be happening—or even felt—simultaneously.

It is unsurprising that the most recurring images in the book are of clouds and wind—both things we know but cannot touch, both capable of bringing pleasure and destruction. We also have the much more concrete recurrence of Washington dc, the firmness of that city and its monuments. In "The World," Chang writes "I was like sculpture, / forgetting or, perhaps, remembering / everything." The "perhaps" is a sly move on Chang's part because of course sculpture is intended to remember what the sculptor has chosen to replicate, and yet so many are forgotten in that choice. Again we see these poems resisting melodrama or absurdity and, instead, outlining the clear attachments between purportedly distinct things or, sometimes, the scar where they've been unnaturally separated.

Chang also utilizes various formal devices to mine the depths of this false division. Sometimes her enjambment is disorienting, as in "It Was Your Birthday Again," when she writes:

"We never swam in the seais the way I now distinguish

the people who've known me longbut not very well."

Like much of the book, this syntax is playful and mournful at once, more certain than it presents itself to be. Chang employs destabilized tercets, other times she offers sequences with one aphorism per section, sometimes tight columns, and occasionally a poem devoid of punctuation. The scope...