Aileron by Geraldine Connolly (review)

If you have ever sat in the window seat of a plane and looked out on the wings, you've seen the aileron, the flaps that trail the fixed wing, rising and falling to balance the lift of the plane or change its direction. What moves in the background of the plane dictates its journey forward, and this flight metaphor underlies the entirety of Aileron, Geraldine Connolly's fourth full-length poetry collection. Driven by intelligent and lyrical reminiscences of childhood, as well as meditations on the Southwestern environment that shapes her adult life, Connolly's poems give shape to the trajectory of her own life while showing us as readers the small ways in which what we thought we left behind is always with us.

Childhood poems always run the risk of being maudlin in their sentimentality, a reflection on simpler times. In Connolly's hands, however, such explorations are tinged with a combination of bitterness and regret alongside pleasure. In "Fable of the Good Daughter," she writes,

Once like a flower I wanted to be good.Once I prayed and obeyed.But something must always happen.Say, a betrayal.Bad birds come to rest.A weed turns into a stave.

The certainty with which the speaker describes the shift—something must happen—leaves no room for happy endings. In response, the speaker "put on cactus skin / thick as chain mail." Appearing early in the book, this poem and its vision of sturdy armature suggests how the speaker plans to survive greater struggles than her failure to be the good daughter. The cactus's sharp skin will grow over the broken relationships, the physical violations, the loss of home. And it helps the speaker find icons who resonate with her own experiences, such as St. Agnes.

In a largely secular collection, one in which sin seems little more than another way for a young girl to be wrong, "Thinking About St. Agnes" is one of a few poems turning toward the religious, though it retains its roots in childhood. Still, despite her youth, the speaker views St. Agnes as a lesson on why faith doesn't do women any good, as she recounts the ways this holy woman was burned alive. For the young speaker, peering at St. Agnes, depicted in her prayer book, she has a simple query:

But why you, Agnes,head tilted skyward whilea fire began to burnbeneath your small white feet.

Oh Agnes, why turninto a wisp of smoke?Why become the ideal gone awry,pure and faceless,wanting God while God looks on?

If self-abnegation is the ultimate feminine good, why was St. Agnes burned at the stake? And why, as the speaker sees, must the story play itself out again and again, with even the most honorable women tortured in new ways, "Torn flesh of gallows, / knife and gun." God, the speaker sees, isn't about to intercede. It's why women need an armature of spikes, anger that burns, a youthful quickness retained as long as possible because there will always be someone trying to take it all away because you are a woman, or because of countless other vulnerabilities—skin the wrong color or the assumed right of men to pillage the land, a concern that marks many of Connolly's poems in both personal and global ways.

Just as Aileron offers a more intellectual, less overwrought approach to the poetry of childhood, Connolly is deft in her approach to ecopoetics, opting for less didactic poems in favor of more imagistic and personal ones. In "Legacy," a poem that falls within both the childhood and ecopoetics categories, she writes about the loss of a beloved family farm to drilling:

A plume of smokerises grimly from the barn.

Since someone has forgottento latch the gate,

a thief has enteredthe garden

Blame here goes unassigned. "Someone" has left the garden open and vulnerable to attack by these oilrigs, but it could have been anyone, perhaps even someone with no right to the garden at all. So much...