The Clearing by Allison Adair

 

The Clearing by Allison Adair

Milkweed Editions, 2020

Winner Max Ritvo Poetry Prize

Review by Marcus Breen

There are moments when reading these exceptional poems by Allison Adair that the reader must stop, take a pause to put the puzzle of language together, then move on. Yet in reading, the pieces fit together like a multi-dimensional structure, opening then closing, generously giving energy.

Poetry like Adair’s, offered in this prize winning first book, takes language on two trajectories: one that offers opaque connections into subconscious sensibilities; the other, narratives that search into the poet’s childhood memory in rural Pennsylvania. Both offer enchanting entry points to a poet who combines the craft of language along with the art of writing as a means to unlock deeply held emotions.

Her schooling in poetics is grounded in academic engagement, teaching writing at Boston College and before that at Boston University. This foundation for her deft poetic skills should not be underestimated, as university teaching provides resources for enhancing one’s capabilities through constant review and criticism of student work. (Full disclosure – I met Allison when she worked with my partner at BU. She is now a colleague of mine at BC). These are not however, academic poems.

The pleasing persistence of her writing is in the lively way the language works to suggest meanings with open potential for interpretation. It is poetry, in the words of the Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “as excess of language, a hidden resource that enables us to shift to the suggestive dimension of language.” The suggestions of Adair’s language emerge out of complex wording arrangements within a determined imaginary.

“Fable” begins with the lines:

What if this year the scrawny splinters of winter refuse

spring’s reckless flesh: its shameless, podgy vining

around stark limb, its honeysuckle undressing raw

to the fruit – profligate, easy with perfume, collagen

accreting in stalks with the slow-boiled gel of a bone

broth. The cold seems tired but has some good fight yet.

Moving in lines that persist in checking in on themselves, using language to offer glimpses of the observed, changing world, Adair connects the materiality of the personal to the objective. She persists in reminding the reader that there are many, often contradictory ways of observing the world: as one is exploring one’s inner life, one is doing so while living fully conscious of the external world. It is poetry that makes the dialectic effective as a truth telling mechanism.

More personal poems express emotion as nearly raw energy. “Memento Mori: Bell Jar with Suspended Child” demands attention, as she writes:

Explosions of promiscuity: coral peonies, lady slipper.

Gape mouthed jewelweed.

Where do I put the rage?

The mother is very present in many of the poems, sharing fears and uncertainties that are best displayed in art such as this. They are, as I wrote in the margin beside these lines when reading this poem, “female sensibility, revelatory sensations.”

Indeed, Adair’s poems collected in The Clearing are rich in the way they compose the inner life of a woman, from personal allusions to sexual suggestivities amid memories of fecund forests and rambling country barns and warm yet unsteady homes; places that emerge out of a desire to tell the truth about the difficulties of negotiating the inner and external world.

She sees real people in their need, miners at the coalface, farmers with their families, all dirty yet dignified, albeit not knowing much, yet loved. Avoiding the sentimental, the language hits some impeccable notes: “we’re the thin pink lung of a wounded canary” she writes about swimming in oil-soaked streams as a child.

One significant aspect of this beautifully presented collection in hardback, is the detail the poet provides in Notes about the life of each poem, especially how they emerged. These confessions as it were, add insight into why Adair writes, the passion to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard. The Notes inform the ideas and images that stimulate her poetry as well as drawing attention to the networks of people and texts who influence her work, including watching You Tube videos late at night.

This fine collection should be widely read, re-read and studied because like all poetry worthy of the nema it bears returning to, as the gems of language already in place reveal themselves in fresh new ways.