Doug Roy, Stroke Stroke, Cut Paper
Remembering Has Never Had Us In It
Rattling between flame and sky,
Landscapes, clocks, and top sheets
burn. They cast shadows with bright knuckles,
play what was onto dust. Dresser drawer mews
with a baby, clown joins a cult, noseless
and noiseless. Nail salon massage chair
thumps and bumps, rhubarb shoots up
in the dark to be like light. After the rifle,
through smoke and broken
air, a fish will find a feather to carry
in its mouth as it slides off the edge
of a parched gully and into a flat day.
A heart waiting for its other beat,
a drummer using her chest to become
what she killed for the last
fire on Earth.
______________
Liv Campbell
Review by Ben Sloan
Letting loose through an uncanny ability to play unrestrainedly with language, Liv Campbell sets the kaleidoscope images in “Remembering Has Never Had Us In It” (and her readers along with them!) spinning. Part of the intense pleasure here, if we can allow ourselves (an open question), is not knowing where we will go to next, where we will end up.
The opening word, “Rattling,” gets off to a lively start, followed by “thumps and bumps” as one travels “through smoke and broken / air” and “slides off the edge / of a parched gully.” Put on your seat belt!
At the same time, the opening line, “Rattling between flame and sky” implies we are caught between two larger (maybe opposing?) types of experience: one suggested by words or phrases like “flame,” “bright,” “shoots up,” “fire,” and “burn”–and another associated with “parched,” “dust,” “broken,” “flat,” and “killed.”
My personal experience of this poem has to do with how it seems to mirror my sometimes feeling, on the one hand, trapped inside another “flat day”–only later to be surprised by a place in me where the “Landscapes, clocks, and top sheets / burn.”
I admire how “Remembering Has Never Had Us In It,” through its sharp, quick, tidy focusing and refocusing, generates so much piqued awareness and energy. I hope in the near future to be able to read an entire collection of Liv Campbell’s poetry.
Review by Dave Mehler
Part of the fun of this poem (and maybe runs across all of the poems in Campbell’s set here) is how difficult it is to get a handle on things–is it a love poem, as the title suggests, or the apocalypse, as the poem body and list of images suggests? A carnival with fireworks? The images are loosely connected but so disparate as to almost come across as surrealism, and as such carry our interest for each one in themselves apart from collective meaning, possible narrative or cohesion. And then there is the fun with sound and alliteration, which also acts as a glue for the voice and tone: fast-paced and unpunctuated and furious. By the end what it adds up to seems beside the point? I love the clown (introduced out of nowhere) without a nose, and we know what the speaker means despite the craziness of any other person without one. Also shadows being cast with bright knuckles. The message is sidelined by the medium and delivery–I’m sorry we missed out on the audio for these. Somehow this all reminds me of REM (the band) and their style of lyric writing.