{"id":166,"date":"2014-01-30T00:51:46","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T05:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=166"},"modified":"2014-01-31T16:54:42","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T21:54:42","slug":"review-of-iron-string-by-annie-lightheart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=166","title":{"rendered":"Review of Iron String by Annie Lighthart"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lightheart<\/a><\/p>\n

Annie Lighthart. Iron String. <\/i>Airlie Press, 2013. 77 pages.\u00a0 $15.00<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Kasey Jueds, Guest Reviewer<\/p>\n

\u201cI stop again and again\/to hear the second music,\u201d Annie Lighthart writes in the first poem of her collection Iron String<\/i>, a poem which functions as a luminous ars poetica, a map for all the poems that come after. The two musics here\u2014\u201cone easier to hear, the other\/lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard\/yet always present\u201d\u2014are the musics Lighthart listens to and makes known to us throughout her wise and graceful book, which concerns itself with the everyday noise of rain, birds, children playing or crying, and with the numinous music that runs beneath these sounds like an underground river.<\/p>\n

Some poems, like some people, don\u2019t reveal themselves easily. They are slippery or barbed, difficult to engage with, to find a way into and through. These sorts of poems present their own pleasures and rewards, but they can also frustrate, can seem to withhold on purpose.<\/p>\n

The poems in Iron String<\/i> offer a deep and different type of pleasure, one that seems rare to me these days: the pleasure of open-heartedness, of deep feeling and thinking offered as gift. They manage to speak both clearly and surprisingly of often-mysterious things, of emotional and spiritual states that feel absolutely true at the same time as they feel unnamable\u2014except, of course, in the way Annie Lighthart does<\/i> name them, by making them into poems that become their names.<\/p>\n

One of the collection\u2019s many beauties is the full expanse of its feeling life. In the poem titled \u201cFebruary,\u201d the speaker is \u201ctoo small for much wreckage, too tight and done with resisting.\u201d In \u201cLight Rain,\u201d after a painful argument, she is \u201cready to fail,\/to go back inside and begin it again.\u201d And in \u201cThe Sea Lion Tank,\u201d she recognizes that \u201cto rise in the morning\/could be to lift your head from that sleep\/and love each salted star for what it may bring.\u201d Iron String<\/i>\u2019s moments of epiphany, of tenderness and love, feel believable because they feel earned: the poems speak with quiet authority of both tenderness and its difficulty, its lack.<\/p>\n

The poems feel bravely themselves: bravely non-ironic, bravely forthright in naming abstractions (love, grief) and making them alive in their ways of seeing the things of the world: a loaf of bread, a cow in a field. The poems\u2019 quotidian details are gates into their world of recognition and newness. I love the balance of relief and wonder these poems offer: relief because they reveal their truths so generously, and wonder because they do so strangely, magically, startlingly. In \u201cThere Were Horses,\u201d Lighthart writes, \u201cAn open white page in any book was a lean white horse\/looking out, and a swollen door stuttering at night was the breath and stamp of a horse nearby.\u201d Here are the familiar forms of horse, book, and door, both reassuringly, invitingly themselves, and magically transformed. (Or possibly not transformed, but seen through into the otherness they also are.) Later in the same poem: \u201cThose days we brushed each others\u2019 hair like the manes of horses\/and with their kindness gave each other kingly gifts.\u201d The generous, open-hearted psychic space of this poem\u2014and many others in the book\u2014feels so deeply lived, reading it makes it easy to believe such a way of being is possible.<\/p>\n

This has been a difficult review to write. Not because Iron String<\/i> did not move me deeply, but because it did<\/i>. And because it is beautiful. In her introduction to Katherine Larson\u2019s Radial Symmetry<\/i>, Louise Gl\u00fcck writes that our natural response to beauty is silence. It\u2019s been challenging to move beyond silence (my own first reaction to Iron String<\/i>: a wordless sense of happiness and gratitude) to find the right words to describe Lighthart\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

But I can say this: I carried Iron String<\/i> in my pink shoulder bag for weeks. I read it in the dentist\u2019s office and on the train. The poems remind me of what I need to remember: to watch and listen, to pay attention, to recognize that there is always more to hear and see. That second music, again. Annie Lighthart reminds me to \u201cset my ear to it as I would to a heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

————————————————<\/p>\n

To propose a review or submit a book for potential review, fill out the contact link above.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Annie Lighthart. Iron String. Airlie Press, 2013. 77 pages.\u00a0 $15.00 Reviewed by Kasey Jueds, Guest Reviewer \u201cI stop again and again\/to hear the second music,\u201d Annie Lighthart writes in the first poem of her collection Iron String, a poem which functions as a luminous ars poetica, a map for all the poems that come after. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,1],"tags":[12,11],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek","category-uncategorized","tag-guest-review","tag-kasey-jueds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions\/169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}