Second Skin (review)

When I opened Second Skin, Sally Bliumis-Dunn's second book of poems, I tried to set aside my impressions of her first book, Talking Underwater, so I could read unfettered. But I wasn't entirely successful. Bliumis-Dunn's metaphor of "talking underwater"—that breakthrough at the surface of the senses—seems to have stuck with me. Moreover, I couldn't help but note that the title of the second book looks over the shoulder to the first, not only through the very word "second" but also through the image of "skin"—again that suggestion of surface and barrier, breakthrough and change.

Second Skin opens with an imperative: "Tell it Slant." The plain diction, the careful push toward completeness of thought down the short lines, through brief stanzas—once again Bliumis-Dunn addresses the very endeavor of it all. In a few (deceivingly) tentative strokes, she manages to set the example in this poem, which is itself achieved through indirection. Just as we "can't look right at the sun," the world itself is "only visible / in the light that falls around it."

In Second Skin, Bliumis-Dunn remains focused on human experience, often gazing into the natural world for the fresh metaphor with which to speak about that experience. The "Dandelion" is a "semi-transparent" globe, which is itself compared to snow, wherein a tree or a house is still visible:

beautiful now,and physically light

as happiness often is:where all that is left

of the body is like thosewhite chutes of seed

that look like so manytiny fountains

when the wind at lastscatters them.

Here the shifting indirection of the imagery achieves an intimacy with the natural world through quick, visual accuracies. And yet, even though the poem ends with the dandelion (the vehicle of the metaphor), the tenor of the whole is that of human experience, human feeling—in this case, the ineffable nature of happiness.

Likewise, in "Late April," the imagery deftly represents the drift of apple and cherry blossoms, and at the same time represents the awareness of the shift in feeling, when the child can already feel "the spirit" of the birthday "closing the open mouth of its excitement."

In "White Pines," the image of the pines in the mist, "as though hovering between being and not being," is the vehicle for the state of "perfect indecision":

when the thought is there,but the words remain packedtight in the throat—

made beautiful somehow.

Bliumis-Dunn remains dedicated to the poetic challenge of seeing clearly (despite the fog), of expressing the thought (despite the words packed tight in the throat), and also of making something "beautiful somehow" of these apprehensions that are poised precariously in present time. The globe of the dandelion gone to seed, the mist momentarily binding the pines, and that "tiny / parallelogram of light" through the window of the poem "Gratitude"—in these small poems, somehow the quick, precise imagery manages to hold onto what will not be held.

But in Second Skin, the poet also turns to gaze at remembered moments from childhood, and at relationships within the family. The collection's title is found in the poem entitled "Walls," which is dedicated in the epigraph to the poet's brother:

we needed actual walls,fieldstones cool againstour backs like a thickersecond skin.

"Walls" also provides a key to Bliumis-Dunn's means of telling it "slant" when the actual telling must be applied to family and other intimate relationships. With only the slightest mention of the trouble the children want to leave behind (one line: "the harsher sounds of home"), the poem enters the forest, beautiful with its "miniature petalled world" of star-like trillium and Dutchman's breeches. Here the children are more purposeful than Hansel and Gretel ever were: they work both at dismantling old fieldstone walls and at building for themselves the "actual walls" they need—a kind of "thicker / second skin." Without painting a visual image of her younger self and the brother beside her in that fort...