Among the reviews that I “rediscovered” in putting together the new website was this gem by Celisa Steele. It appeared last year in Pirene’s Fountain, and anyone who knows Celisa will not be surprised at the depth and insight of the review. It’s worth reading whether you’re interested in For One Who Knows How to Own Land or not for what it says about the craft of poetry and the role poetry plays in the world around it.
The review has many paragraphs worth quoting, but this one may be my favorite:
The light in “Leaning Through Darkness to See the Stars,” the quasi-eponymous poem of book’s first section, is more secular—the stars of the title are birds’ eyes. Along with the fine sounds (all the dark ds building up to alliteration near the end, the importance of dead emphasized by the rhyming already following so closely, the lamenting vowels in pocked and sloppy), the poem’s power derives from its refusal to name its subject: no mention of crow, not even of bird. The poem concludes with a kind of ambivalent sympathy for the crop-eating birds:
Most seemed half-dead already, wings
tattered and pocked full of holes,
faces sloppy and scarred.
Only their eyes seemed clear,
black stones shining in death’s dull face. (29-33)
Not naming the subject is another example of the reluctance to reduce that we see in “The Event Rightfully Remembered,” a suspicion that labels are just a reductive convenience.
The entire review can be read here.