Design
Design
by Theresa Burns (Terrapin Books, $17)
“Love, we’re alive. It’s May, there’s a Canada/ warbler at the feeder and I’ll share him with you,/ his necklace of black bone, his yellow eye, the high/ chipped syllables he won’t waste on us for long.”
An editorial in the New York Times recently claimed that poetry is dead. Among the writer’s spurious arguments was the claim that poetry must be about nature and since our civilization is so far removed from nature, poetic experience is no longer possible. I think this claim tells us more about the writer than it does about poetry; that he has a rather narrow view of what constitutes nature and that he hasn’t read very much contemporary poetry. For if he had, perhaps Design by Theresa Burns, a poetic celebration of the natural world, would have found its way to his bookshelf.
The poems in this collection are quite simply bursting with life. We feel the movement of trees “from the taproot up through pith/ and sapwood, heartwood, the inner bark,/ branch out through capillary action/ to the terminal buds that dot their crowns.” This is the excitement and the force of nature, this constant renewal and the will to survive. Our existence is connected to their existence, and so the trees are a part of us as well, and we begin to see our own movement reflected here. Design contains a poem about Walt Whitman and you can feel his presence throughout the book. Lines like, “the body itself kept breathing,/ taking stock of its requisites,/ its cells and circuitry/ quietly repairing themselves,” are Whitmanesque in both their cataloguing of the body and their exuberance in the tiniest details of life. Like Whitman, Burns longs to burst free with the flowers and the grasses and it is a joy to witness the moments when she accomplishes that in this collection.
Burns is smart enough to know that nature and our relationship to it are often more complex than frolicsome wanderings in the fields and hills. Nature is both beautiful and violent, a contradiction that we still have a hard time reconciling. Thus, “the enormous hosta we moved out back/ fills out, blue as a lung,/ threatens to inhale the ghost ferns.” The garden is the scene of a glorious blossoming and a brutal murder. In a more flowery style, these facts would be easy for a poet to ignore. Enamored as she is of nature, Burns will not shield her readers from its truths. Some of these truths are lovely, some are bloody, and some are just mysterious, “the wind. If you can’t see it,/ it can’t be taken away.”
These poems are buoyed by the author’s masterful lines. Though the poems are written in free verse, Burns has an intuitive understanding of the musical possibilities of assonance and alliteration, “pages overlaid/ with scribbles,/ Spirographed/ and bulls-eyed.” There is also the stark majesty of a phrase like, “shook pity into blossom.” Though I’ve never actually seen such a thing, I somehow know what Burns is describing here and I yearn desperately to understand it on an even deeper level. In the world of Theresa Burns there is a “soft/ meadowland/ above your elbow” and a boulevard “wide because its shoulder is the sea.” It is pleasant to spend so much time in a place where lines flow past you, filled with layers of meaning.
I am not sure that the book needed all of the personal poems about Burns and her family, but I did enjoy the moments in these pieces when she confronted tragedy with honesty and humor. There are poems about the family car breaking down in a wealthier parent’s driveway or her daughter coming home early from college due to the pandemic, “she couldn’t hide her disappointment/ at arriving two months early, re-entering/ her old room like a nineties hit song/ she felt no nostalgia for.” There is a willingness in this collection to confront the awkward situations that we all endure. Endurance, survival; Burns knows that like everything else in nature we have to find ways to move forward, hopefully with a little more wisdom and humor than we had before.
Benjamin Schmitt
Benjamin Schmitt is the author of four books, most recently The Saints of Capitalism and Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The Good Men Project, Hobart, Columbia Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he has also written articles for The Seattle Times and At The Inkwell. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.