American Book Review

Susan Sindall has been writing, reading, and publishing her poems for a long time, and as an editor of Heliotrope has also encouraged other poets to publish. More recently, she has studied with Ellen Bryant Voigt at Warren Wilson College's MFA poetry program.

Her newest book, What's Left, is a tremendous achievement—a sort of reckoning up of all that she has experienced, sensed, observed, and remembered in her entire life and of all that's lost or left behind. There are many themes in this book, and they interweave gracefully with each other. Among them is music—as in "From Brahms' Letter Thanking Robert Schumann":

Tenderness, you see, trembles at the edges of everything. Water slips over rocks at the inlet, enlarging the pebbles through the water's tender moving. Your hands, poised above the keyboard—your nerves' tricky fires on the piano keys: those sparks, their tortures: we know them...

In Italy, for instance, as I watched Clara reach for the ripe figs; how gently she cupped each scrotum : those sacks, fleshy, yellow, and seed-filled—just seeing them generates the notes.

Here we have brilliant shoptalk among musicians about where notes of music arise—from tenderness, from seeing water move over stones, from watching a woman handle and eat figs so sexual they are likened to testicles. This is an "ars poetica" but also a metaphysical discussion about geology and geography, about water and its meanings, about stones and their meanings, a discussion which appears in many other poems in this beautifully crafted book. From "Gros Ventre Valley," we read this stanza:

Water writes its own calligraphy.Water gathers rocks, hugs bouldersto its sides, spreads themgrandly in a long serpent curve,the hem of the water's skirt.

So we find here the geological "serpent curve" echoed throughout the book—introduced actually in the first poem, "After," in which

she seesthem dangling everywhere, loopstangled in the branches, headsor tails, indecipherable....

The snake appears even in "Akhmatova's Fountain House" in which the poet descries a boa constrictor (in a photo?) suffocating a rabbit. Snakes begin to seem objective correlatives, or even symbols, for inspiration, as they were in Stanley Kunitz's poem about his Provincetown garden.

But to go back to "Gros Ventre Valley." How many poets could reckon with death as baldly as in the couplet, "Not much between me and death. / Not enough years left"? This is another leitmotif of the book—death's approach and its meaning in the midst of life. There are several wonderful elegaic poems dedicated to the poet's mother and father—who are curiously both seen as under water. In "Voices," "the great pike, enormous curve of pisces, / smiles my father's smile." In "Offshore," the poet realizes when her mother speaks out loud to her,

You must have been beside me for monthsbeside me swimming, as our fingers [End Page 27] pulled us across the speckled sandunderneath the green water.

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Detail from cover

In "Offshore," we find in the first stanza Sindall's ability to describe a shore as exactly as Elizabeth Bishop could in "Correspondences":

Low tide: the sandbar's tawny flanklifts from the middle of the river. Rivulets pretendto nervous and continental systemsbetween ridges in every direction.Tethered skiffs hang exactly sideways.Everything on the surface waits to be told what to do.

Here is the patterning of sand exactly described and also the susurrus of inspiration in which "Everything on the surface waits to be told what to do." I felt this rhythm of waiting for inspiration often in the book—and no wonder, since just about every single poem seems deeply felt, inspired. In "Getting into Stone," we find a convergence of geology and death, in which human life appears a small thing blinking once "like a firefly":

Earth's inevitable axiscreaks, revolvingthe barrel of stones, who shovesnout noses underground.Face to face, they grind into sand.

In the last stanza, Sindall writes so powerfully, "When I lay me down to stones, / they accept me as I am. / Rubble clears its throat above me." How much more stone-like could this poem be? In its praise of stones, it takes on their qualities. And I love the choice of words in their shoving "snout noses underground."

There are many small but powerful poems in this book, such as "The Love Dress," in which the dress encloses and then releases a woman's, the poet's, body in its "glowing skin," or "Half Sleep" in which a childhood self runs through the poem, wearing "my blue pink white plaid dress" which becomes, by the poem's end, "my blue pink white / scraps of paper"—the poems themselves.

But it would be unfair to write about this book without noting the multi-part long poems which are its string quartets. "Mother Tongue" is a splendid, almost narrative poem, about the funeral of a mother of young children, who mourn her in part by each carrying a flower to place in her coffin, each in his own way. And yet, there is a sense of distance and shock conveyed by these words:

The open coffin invites you into a creamfabric room. Vanilla covered buttons tuft the ceilingover the life-sized doll you've always wantedwaiting with curled lashes over closed eyes.

"Renovations" is a five-part poem in which a house becomes an objective correlative for the destruction and re-building of the self and its emotions, as in part 1, in which accidents and emergencies occur, and culminate in these stark lines:

If I could raisemy senses to the third powerand multiply themby my distance from these objects,death, would I understand your clarity?

Part 2 creates the ghost of a dead girl (or a version of a childhood self) in the now empty house. In part 4, the basement of the house is a locus of memory of the father and mother, as the child poet wears "scarlet / leather ten league boots" which by the end are "my father's red boots" while the mother is remembered for "the Cretan terra cotta / honeycomb where my mother's / snake drinks milk."

Part 3 describes the dismemberment of the coal-burning furnace, the stripping of the house's roof, and the discovery of old clothes still hanging:

Baggedwinter coatswith vacant necksloll from ceiling hooks...........................Summer's full breastswait inside a silk blouse.

In the final section, the poet remembers a boy who bit her arm:

Stillred and open on my flesh,his evenlydented ghostmouth.

So a lifetime of physical and sensual and emotional memories bites deep into the poet's work, making it incredibly vivid to us, her open-mouthed readers.