‘Verge’ by Sara Burant, Comment by Erik Muller

Sara Burant. Verge. Finishing Line Press. $14

                                                                    Comment by Erik Muller 

One virtue of chapbooks is their clarity of intent that can be sustained for a reading straight through. It is a rare larger volume that allows this.

Sara Burant’s Verge assuredly develops its title as theme and variations. The verge is principally a border, an edge, the brink of something. It is also movement in a direction. The vision of the poems allows that this something, this direction, can be both known and unknown, both grasped and unattained. Another variation, verger, suggests someone, the poet in this case, who takes care of the interior of a church and acts as attendant during ceremonies.

One verge is the boundary between the human and natural worlds. The adolescent student in the poem “Verge” yearns to be free of the classroom and outside with a “flicker of bright something,” a bevy of monarch butterflies. She is maturing for flight. The Japanese Garden can call the adult to things she needs to relearn, how to unwind “to be small/as a winter wren, how to enter/the secret rooms of ferns.”

Another verge locates the speaker between wanting and not wanting to recognize “our other selves,” as revealed by the burgeoning mushrooms, pushing from underground in all-too-human fingertips, skin, and lips. “We’re caught on the verge” because to be known fully can be “forbidden, even dangerous.”

The most tender verge involves the poet and her father in the several pieces during her childhood and after his death. In his saying “Goodnight now Sara,” she is safely at one with him, yet the verge is acute as she writes his elegy. The winter-wren with the power to sing “the sky inside him” is the tutelary muse:

Sing to them, winter wren. Tell them the dead,

having risen,

linger inside us like song.

Song is at the heart of these variations, music being made, being carried. Burant manages even her anecdotal poems as harmonies, drawing together disparate materials and emotions, expressing them smoothly and collectedly. As in the trim lines of “Song”:

It is light here

step in

this heart is boundless

and stays

And in “All Flesh,” a poem concluded with one Christian reference among several in the collection, this to the mystic of Norwich:

for the flames I became, the heat, the rising,

shards of bone left for the earth to hold

the way Julian held a hazelnut in her vision.

And wasn’t she shown in a clear light

that all flesh, all matter, is ever

cupped like a nut, a fruit, a seed in God’s

hand? Think of it: everything

seen and unseen, even the slow rot

at the edges of our days.

The nut, the nest, the father’s embrace— in this finely tuned chapbook, these are the something, the direction, beyond the verge.

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