Reviewed by Carol Barrett
REVOKE by Joy Manesiotis
Airlie Press, 2023, 67 pages, $18.00
ISBN 978-1-950404-12-4
Available at www.airliepress.org
Growing up, I often heard the phrase “betwixt and between.” It seems an apt way to describe the themes of Manesiotis’ poems in REVOKE. The subjects of this work include the poet’s contending with infertility and with her mother’s death. We feel both the longing for a child and for the reassuring presence of the mother. The longed-for child comes by way of another woman’s body, and we are given a rare account of the anxious wait for that precious gift. Throughout the poems, we are between if and when, between now and then, between the current moment and soon, between together and apart, between present and absent.
The graphic layout of this collection also supports this “between-ness.” Gray pages with white print interrupt the traditional white pages with black print. Interspersed with the longer poems about the speaker’s experience, the poet has planted a series of shorter “Variation” poems. These describe a particular aspect of the natural scene. Placed on a gray landscape, they seem almost to meld their observations with the poems that surround them. Here is the opening to my favorite short poem, “Variation: Morning”:
Fog, rolling over the mountain, capping its soft peak
and floating down, its own ocean, the spruce and conifers’ gray trunks
another, rougher gray, and tufted gray-green clusters of needles, some
deep against the tree’s center: small hands, offerings…
I regard “Bonfire” as one of the most compelling long poems in the collection. Here the speaker searches frantically for her child who has disappeared on the beach with a young friend. She tells us:
She probably missed them, they are probably safe at the house, laughing,
drinking cocoa –
the wrack and kelp, barnacle and limpet exposed to air
before the lush of salt water covers them again
As in these examples, one of the ways the poet places us in her narratives is through a continual mapping of the elements of nature. They seem to join almost consciously in the human drama. The sky, the sea, the wind, birds, trees, and the many flowering plants she identifies all provide company for the speaker. They are collaborators in destiny. They are quite literally with her in the tenuous journeys of search, hope, and shifting circumstance. From “The voice was a gift,” we have the meadow bright inside my chest / rife with magenta and citrine: loosestrife, wild mustard. From the opening poem “This,” the black crows / big as cats who strut at its feet are the real messengers. From “Study: 3,” this evocative stanza:
The mockingbird sounds its alarm, as if to warn the sleepers
the wave is about to hit, the one the woman dreams of, walking along the boardwalk,
watching the small curls roll up the shore.
An especially deft and unique poem is “Tango,” beguiling us with this classic partnered ballroom dance. She describes the couple’s energy and body work with the ocean, wind, tree and sky as imagistic guides. Here is one moment:
Wind runs through their bodies
wind that is like water, holds water
whipping around the bones as if limbs on a poplar
I would love to see an entire collection of such vivid dance poems! As someone trained as a dancer, I am especially moved by this work (pun intended!)
Near its conclusion, the book introduces us to an ancient Greek ritual in which the body of the deceased is exhumed five years after the death, and the bones cleansed with wine. In “Sign,” the poet imagines this ceremony in honor of her mother. Both a “witness” and “a child” participate, whom we can conjure as the poet and her daughter. It is one more way we are placed between life and death, presence and absence, between what is buried, and what we hold in our hands.
The cover of REVOKE features a striking photograph by Caras Ionut. We see a tilting merry-go-around, out of service now, on which a crow has landed, beak open perhaps to call to us. In the distance, a bare tree sways in the breeze. It is a fitting image to represent that mix of desire and loss which Manesiotis has memorialized for us in these beckoning poems.
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