Book Review

Jessica Poli’s debut collection, Red Ocher, stirs with its reverential questioning of ritual, boundary, and expectation. Though the collection modestly labels itself as the red paint of a barn, Red Ocher unabashedly opens into an intimate search for the true meaning of knowledge and the missed acts of closure following a first love. Poli’s collection introduces a closely intertwined, and often dark, relationship between the speaker and nature: The last words to a lover become like the moon, a duck’s severed head becomes a humble encounter with the past, and the death of a horse explores the constraints of the self. The collection contains many depictions of the natural world, but the poems separate from a tradition of nature writing that allows the reader purely a subjectified view of the landscape. Instead, Poli’s poems carefully acknowledge the small, restricted space occupied by their speakers and strive to bring readers’ attention to the wider world the poems exist within, as illustrated by the different perspectives offered through the borrowed lines in the collection’s many centos. While grounded by the imagery of animal and plant rearing, the Red Ocher is also reaching for the celestial, creating an expanse even bigger than the fields the speaker inhabits, the voices of the centos, and the blank space in poems such as “Field of View.” Nebulas reappear throughout the pages, the giant dazzling clouds of dust and gas caused by the death or growth of a star beckon the reader to see the life cycle of animals and of love as a testament, not only to living within a rural landscape, but also as a testament to imagining what might come later.

The collection’s opening poem, “Balm,” asks the reader to consider the mortality of a lamb and the speaker’s power to alleviate the pain of one so vulnerable. The stark opening sentence establishes the speaker’s proximity to the thin, cyclical lines of living and dying while the imagistic speaker’s confession of knowing how to soothe the lamb’s pain interrogates an authority to see the beauty in an enacted death:

It’s morning, and in my arms

another lamb is dying.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And I’ve looked at her throat

and thought about how I would cut it

if I had to, if her suffering

grew larger than what her body

could contain; have watched videos

on how to do it;

and now, holding her,

I picture bright droplets of blood

scattered on the pine chips below us,

and I know—I’m ashamed to say it—

that it would be beautiful.

The poem begins with death in the morning, in a kind of inverse resurrection story, causing the reader to clash between understanding death as a time of ending and morning as a time of new beginnings. While in “Balm,” the speaker describes the beauty found in the “bright droplets of blood / scattered on the pine chips below us / this sentiment is bluntly retracted later in the collection in a poem entitled by its form, “Palinode.” In “Palinode,” the speaker admits to their earlier problematic imagining of the lamb’s blood: “The blood from the lamb / wasn’t beautiful. / I know this / even not having seen it / (she died in the night).” When the speaker in “Palinode” confesses to having only pretended to see the lamb die, Poli creates a unique space for unsureness, retraction, and variance.

The frequent centos act in accordance with this theme of expansion; the centos pull the reader, forcefully at times, into a reckoning with and acknowledgement of the world around us that will never cease to exist. “Epistolary Cento” is not the first cento in the collection, but appears near the end, raising and answering questions of how the speaker interacts with nature and the past. Each of the poem’s six sections are divided by a crescent moon turned on its side, the same small figure which also appears on the dividing page between the six parts of Red Ocher. The opening of “Epistolary Cento” addresses a second person “you” and is representative of the collection’s thread of unrequited love poems:

I’m going to hide behind language

where dead lichens drip

where only present tense survives,

a slow fire

or the shadows’ shuddering

through waist-high fields,

which is a memory of my past, which I give to you

in this letter,

as I try to leave you again.

Poli’s “Epistolary Cento” allows the collection to morph into an endeavor of rethinking the boundaries of the expanse around us as the speaker disseminates their own acts of disclosure through the collective voice of the cento’s form. While the “shadows shuddering through waist-high fields” are the speaker’s past, they are also evidencing the speaker is not oblivious to the presence of others. The cento form is a tangible recognition of this collective aspect found in the individual’s experience: Each line of the speaker’s emotional resolve is in the voice of another speaker, thus, Poli’s use of the cento form successfully broadens without universalizing the speaker’s personal experiences by joining the collective (lines of the cento form) and the individual (the speaker’s own memories).

The collection’s final poem, “Holmes Lake,” clearly identifies itself as the beginning, and not the end, of a nearly impossible search to grasp the beautiful poignancy of the people and animals around us by stating:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And I knew a dairy farmer once who, when a cow

was to be put down, would turn her out into the pasture

one last time to watch the sun set. I wonder if all

these animals look at the sky and see something

that I never will . . .

Ostensibly, the ideal audience of Red Ocher are those who are interested in the human relationship with nature, but really, this collection is for all of us who have felt, or need to feel, an ending transform into a beginning. Perhaps ultimately, Poli’s collection illustrates how a collapse can lead to an expansion, leading not to an expansion of knowing, but of the true beauty of not knowing.