In Accelerated Silence by Brooke Matson (review)

In Brooke Matson’s second collection of poetry, In Accelerated Silence, winner of the 2019 Jake Adam York Prize, supermassive stars, lithium, the biblical Eve, and others are given voices and deep contemplation, wrestling with life and death and the realities of living in a physical cosmos. Such is the whirl of contradictions and uncertainties that In Accelerated Silence confronts, through a single speaker who nevertheless embodies a variety of personae.

In Accelerated Silence succeeds by unifying this chorus into a single narrative, which brings the reader along to encounter a grief deeply rooted in physical realities. In “Law of the Conservation of Mass,” the speaker reflects,

The starlings singat morning and evening,the same doorway—singthough the hollow your hipscarved on the bed has no massto hold its shape.

So many of the objects that the poems fixate on hold memories of the beloved. Matson returns many times to pomegranates, writing in one poem,

my cart is emptyand I am wavering on the scuffed linoleumof the produce aisle, rubbing the skin of a pomegranateas if it were your hand.

Objects trigger memories, which lead the speaker into deeper communion—and deeper confrontation—with the world.

In “Ode to Dark Matter,” which contains the line from which the collection takes its title, the speaker listens to a scientist on the radio, who

describes a minedeep under the earthwhere professors hunt the flutter of your wingsin accelerated silence—

The professors in Matson’s poem demonstrate the same urgency that runs throughout the book: an urgency to know and understand the functioning of the physical world, and to investigate it in the places where the cosmic and the microscopic meet. The speaker reels from the loss of a partner to brain cancer and looks for answers to the body’s betrayal that are rooted in the physical world. At the same time, Matson recognizes that such a project of understanding the universe is doomed to fail—and perhaps should be. She concludes her “Ode to Dark Matter” by observing:

Whatever we see, we break—count and dismemberall we touch

The poem entreats dark matter to

Be the animal that escapesour love without a wound.

Matson’s “Ode to Dark Matter” sets the stage for the many odes and elegies that underpin the structure of the collection. The formal thrust of these elegies and odes mirror each other, as the movement of the book is marked by both acceleration and deceleration, creating an energizing framework of contrast and opposites.

The book maintains its undeniable velocity and emotional resonance through a playful expertise with form, both traditional and contemporary. Matson’s careful sestina (a notoriously difficult-to-execute form) “Neurosurgery” sings, and she counters such formal accomplishments with high-velocity prose poems such as “Broaden the Subject.” The variety of forms and voices lends new breath to Matson’s laser-focused subject.

The book moves through many modes and oscillates between the heartbreaking and the hopeful, but the voice that sounds throughout is fresh, confident and consistently engaging. Uncertainty, dread, loss, doubt, and despair run throughout the collection, but these experiences are marked with tenderness and ultimately skew toward a hope that, Matson insists, rests in the reality of the natural world: in the beauty and mystery embedded into the elemental makeup of the cosmos. Despite microscopic realities being the things that have betrayed the body to its own loss, Matson looks resolutely to these same realities as the source of new wonder. When an amaryllis blossom inspires the speaker to religious exaltation, she observes

after it wiltswhen I cut away the head   anotherwill rise in its place   and another after thatand another after that

The poem lands in an expression of joy at nature’s power to renew itself and keep going, even in the face of death and desolation.