Book Review

Incorporating a few of the poems and themes that appeared in his collection Night Logic, Matthew Gellman reprises his poems of loss, retrospection, and family in the deeply psychological collection Beforelight. In these tender poems of personal and familial exploration, readers find a speaker tuned to nature and keen on taking the fragile elements of one’s life and cradling them carefully. Simultaneously, the speaker also looks inward and grapples with the painful, harrowing moments that sculpted them into the person readers see in this collection.

Family plays a definitive role in Gellman’s collection. The speaker continually interacts with a brother and their mother, and they frequently recall the absent father whose judgments and criticisms weighed heavily on the speaker. In poems like “Brother, Age Six,” the speaker celebrates a playfulness between siblings. Elegant, yet simplistic, in its remembrance, the speaker portrays two brothers who, left alone, play with their mother’s shoes. The speaker describes the shoes as “glossy, upright / prizes.” The shoes are a significant object, as for the speaker and their brother, they are an object which helps define their mother. The brother imitates the mother, “sauntering // across the cream-colored carpet” until the brother falls. The brother’s action of falling is also significant. The portrayal of falling acts as a shift toward the poem’s conclusion, and it also acts as a moment of realization for the speaker and the brother:

we laughed until you pushed me off.
You looked and said, Do you sometimes

wanna go someplace else. I said, Where.
Then you stood up in your heels and practiced.

Interestingly enough, at this point, the speaker transfers the high-heeled shoes’ ownership from the mother to the brother. The speaker’s transference of the ownership is noteworthy, because it is as though the speaker recognizes the brother’s—and perhaps their own—sexuality.

“My Family Asks Me to Speak” offers readers another exploratory journey in sexuality and individuality. In it, the speaker describes their sexuality as a “tapestry” their family is close to “unthreading.” They are asked to deepen their voice. An important image lies tucked into the poem’s condensed, compressed form—the depiction of hunters “in red coats, chasing the foxes” adorning a dinner plate. The speaker’s reflection about this image is where the poem begins unfolding, one line onto the other. The speaker imagines that outside “animals are starting to yield to geometries / of winters.” The speaker experiences a sense of displacement within the family because of their sexuality, which is implied as the speaker would like to “go out / to the forest and try to join them [the animals].” The speaker also confesses that for most of their life, they have always “wanted to give up to the snow.” In this confession, a sense of defeat and of isolation develops, but so does the transcendentalist concept of returning to nature in order to find and heal one’s self.

Transcendentalism, too, is at the core of many of Gellman’s poems. While these verses inherently dissect the nature of family and the individual’s role within a family, moreover they uplift and celebrate nature’s glory and the respite it offers. Thus, in poems like “Doe,” Gellman establishes a new, modern type of American transcendentalism. “Doe” is a quiet, intimate, and shapely poem in which the speaker observes a doe springing from the underbrush in winter. Each stanza slants from left to right, mimicking the doe’s bounding. The poem’s lines shift and volley thanks to enjambment, reinforcing the speaker’s emotional grit as they pursue a memory of potentially seeing their father for the final time. The form furthermore allows readers to absorb the poem sonically:

She shivered, shook

the snow from her back

then broke into the branches—

The staggering, brief lines emphasize the hush created by the words “shivered” and “shook” as well as the hardness of words like “broke” and “branches.” Again, the speaker returns to the necessity of winter as an important component of their identity. Whereas in “My Family Asks Me to Speak” the speaker directly states their desire to become one with the snow, in “Doe” winter and its coldness become a cure. The speaker personifies the doe as a “doctor,” who “shrugging off her coat,” prescribes “the cold” to the speaker.

Other poems, such as “Night Logic,” fuse nature with sociopolitical themes, referencing, for example, the murder of Matthew Shepard. The poem is an open letter to a world that oppresses the queer community. The speaker suggests, “To be queer is to be questioned / on the way your breathing / displaces light.” In other words, the speaker is acknowledging that many in the world ask why queer people should have the right to exist—an ongoing conversation and flashpoint particularly in the realm of American politics, where LGBTQ rights are under attack. The right to exist is a paramount theme in this poem, and images of “dead grass” and words like “interrupting” and “extinguished” convey how fragile that right to exist is for certain portions of the population. With its reliance on natural imagery—ranging from astronomical references, such as to the stratosphere, to more terrestrial ones, like fences and landscapes—the poem echoes Lesléa Newman’s October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard.

Beforelight is a spellbinding collection, one in which the poems possess a magical duality. These verses are part confessional narrative, part personal prayer. They are realms entirely their own, where landscapes mirror an individual’s personality. Simultaneously, they also dissect the inner workings of relationships and interactions that so profoundly transform a person’s life. Those inner workings at first seem unmanageably complex and indecipherable. Yet, because of minimalistic forms and Gellman’s painter’s touch with words, life’s—and love’s—brutality becomes more manageable and simply another landscape to carefully observe.