A Magnificent Book
A Review of Crossing Over
There is an immense sadness in this volume of poems by Priscilla Long. That sadness is anchored in the death of her sister, Susanne. Of the 50 poems in Crossing Over, six are centered on the sister. To this reader, the most poignant of the sister poems is Visitations (p. 38) that ends with these lines:
The dead have nothing new to say.
They do not age,
but their deaths are aging.
We seldom cry for them now.
Still, on odd, solitary evenings
they come to call.
They visit, but they have lost
the art of conversation.
They repeat themselves.
They have nothing new to say.
As only a virtuoso can, the poet evokes much more than she shows, more than she tells as in Light at Arles (p. 55):
A sun-drenched afternoon
painted in a peacock century.
The bare room: bed, basin,
board: a poor man's coat
hung on nails; two chairs
for smoke and talk.
Here, we wait for the door to open and Vincent to enter, but that is not to be:
Soon Munch will carve
his scream. The century will die
in its pictures.
The meditative core of much of the poetry in this book lies in the self-aware transience that the poet exploits to speak to us in a very personal yet profound way. The Body Poem (p.13) lets us see a purpose, a reason, perhaps, for writing-we all wish for, in some way, a portion of immortality. To achieve this moment, the poet marries the sadness of death to the knowledge that the work lives on:
After death the writer's body
inhabits the body of work.
The eye remains,
the hand everywhere in notebooks
The heart in beat and rasp of poem.
Voice, breast, breath,
the intricate vulva devolving
into throb, blood hot,
or not. The naked foot
dancing, leaping,
all in the body of work.
There is much in this book about destruction and creation, about destruction as creation; it is, after all, a book about bridges and the people who build and use them. But this book is also a lamentation on human weakness and human stupidity. In the most successful sestina I have read in a long time, the poet evokes our failure to be the stewards of the land as we become, in fact, merchants of death. I'll quote just a few stanzas from the sestina, Nile Valley landslide (p. 23):
They wake to cracks, rocks
dropped, rains of gravel, the fall
of mountain sand, seabottom, dirt
of the ages. Then a basalt
boulder rolls into the river,
roaring like an animal.
...
The Naches River, dirt -
choked, runs like a spooked animal,
flows around basalt.
Trout gasp on high rock.
The mountain rides it slow fall
into the ancient river.
...
Now comes October, the fall
of the great fall of basalt.
We Homo sapiens, brainless animal,
quarried the old rock of the river-
bank, sold the landslide toe, dirt
once pillar to mountain rock.
And so the great rocks fall
and the dirt marries basalt, and the river
rages like a wounded animal.
Crossing Over is a complex work by a complex thinker. Often the poems present themselves in a simple way only to show, deeper in, that they mask jewels we can claim only by reading and re-reading. This is the gift of poetry-not quick, not easy, neither facile nor superficial. And Priscilla Long has done it well. I recommend this book to all poets, to all lovers of poets, to lovers of poetry.
