{"id":273,"date":"2014-09-14T22:04:51","date_gmt":"2014-09-15T02:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=273"},"modified":"2014-09-14T22:04:51","modified_gmt":"2014-09-15T02:04:51","slug":"review-of-its-day-being-gone-by-rose-mclarney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=273","title":{"rendered":"Review of Its Day Being Gone by Rose McLarney"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"McLarney<\/a>Rose McLarney. Its Day Being Gone. <\/em>Penguin, 2014. 93 pgs. $20.00.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Kasey Jueds, guest reviewer.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs the rendering of precise image a form of attention to this world or a means of departure from it?\u201d Melissa Kwasny asks in Earth Recitals: Essays on Image & Vision<\/em> (Lynx House, 2013). \u201cIs the non-human another dimension we have been excluding or is the non-human a symbol masking a symbolic or mystical dimension, an other than earthly dimension? Do animals and plants stand for something else, and thus, lose their value as beings that exist<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m reading Its Day Being Gone<\/em> and Kwasny\u2019s book in Wisconsin, at my family\u2019s farm, in my own place of rivers and histories: Rose McLarney\u2019s poems abound with both, and with the non-human presences of chickens, fish, dogs, cougars\u2014her words, and the meadow I walk into every day here, making Kwasny\u2019s questions about the more-than-human world and how to take our place, to write<\/em>, within it, even more alive.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said I would never use animals\/as the figures for my sorrow again,\u201d McLarney writes in the book\u2019s first poem, \u201cFacing North,\u201d which is, in part, about euthanizing a goat. I love this admission, its honesty, its hard look at the question of what and whom we do<\/em> use in order to make things. And I love it that the next lines turn this sort-of promise on its head, as effortlessly as feelings change inside the body, and with the same dizzying suddenness:<\/p>\n

But when the goat dropped shot,
\nthe bread I\u2019d brought to get her
\nto put her head down still in her teeth,
\nthe chickens pecked at it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still here. I can\u2019t stay away
\nfrom the hard images. Bread
\ntaken from her mouth even then.<\/p>\n

Throughout the book, these dazzling shifts: from precise seeing of the physical world to the mysterious, the abstract, the dim interior of the speaker\u2019s mind and heart\u2014and then back again: graceful, seamless. In \u201cRedemption,\u201d the lines weave between the bears the speaker\u2019s watching and her unanswered, unanswerable questions about faith, belief, what it means to be human. \u201cAre bears like humans,\u201d she asks, \u201chaunted\/by deaths or the less definite and so ceaseless losses\/that are love?\u201d These poems take up Kwasny\u2019s questions about the non-human world as image and as itself<\/em> by embodying those questions: by their clear-eyed looking, their stepping back to see<\/em> the bears, or the spilled organs of the shot buck in \u201cGuts, Gleam,\u201d twined with their stepping forward, into mysterious layers of feeling and spirit.<\/p>\n

McLarney\u2019s poems are like the bodies of water she keeps returning to: smooth surfaces over a deep, tangled, often contradictory, and fully human emotional life. In \u201cWatershed,\u201d an Appalachian river hides not just fish but trashed cars: \u201cI swam over a wreck for years without seeing it until I grew old enough,\/got long legs, and something soft and slick wrapped around my toe,\/a seat belt unloosened, rotten backseat leather unfurling in current,\/drawing me down to the metal below. Imagine where such\/waters could let you drift.\u201d In \u201cImminent Domain,\u201d whole towns lie below a dam-created lake. The speaker, vacationing, swims above them, but she can\u2019t stop thinking and feeling her way beneath the surface, can\u2019t \u201cstay away from the hard images,\u201d can\u2019t stop looking or writing: \u201cMy thoughts should swim\/with darkness, hearths gone cold, emptied graves,\/fish slipping slick-bellied over stones,\/when I turn on an electric lamp.\u201d In her fierce seeing of herself<\/em> among the other people and creatures who inhabit her poems, McLarney\u2019s speaker is both individual, etched against deer and mechanics, and woven among them, part of the same cloth.<\/p>\n

The poems\u2019 graceful musicality makes reading them\u2014swimming in them\u2014feel full of ease: I read through the whole book in one sitting. It\u2019s the unsettled and unsettling emotional life underneath the poems\u2019 surfaces that is difficult, often painful. In \u201cArcadia,\u201d a woman burns down her own house because she\u2019s \u201cthat desperate for something new,\u201d while the poem\u2019s speaker tries to do the opposite: let go of desire, purify her life, put away her own yearning for change. One of the last poems in the book, \u201cI Float,\u201d flips the ache for the ruined towns of \u201cImminent Domain\u201d upside down: here a flooded river wrecks the speaker\u2019s family\u2019s harvest, but the speaker is dazzled (though she knows she should be distressed) by the damage:<\/p>\n

The leaves wafted, the rounds
\nof fruits that had hung,
\nthough ruined, were buoyant now.
\nBroken by refraction, they changed
\nto baubles I wanted.<\/p>\n

The flood was a costumer, a jeweler.
\nAnd the way water cut ordinary sights,
\nthat was appealing labor:
\nmaking stone toss about weightless light.<\/p>\n

Everywhere, within and between poems, Its Day Being Gone<\/em> tugs between poles: past and future, staying and leaving, finding contentment with what is and longing for something other. But because the book makes such a glowing whole, it argues for\u2014it is<\/em>\u2014a place where those seeming opposites fuse. They will keep tugging at each other, but the poems take that tugging and turn it, miraculously, into a place to rest, a place where beauty and truth-telling offer a profound solace. In that way, they are a form of redemption.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

To propose a guest review or submit a book for review, fill out the contact form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rose McLarney. Its Day Being Gone. Penguin, 2014. 93 pgs. $20.00. Reviewed by Kasey Jueds, guest reviewer. \u201cIs the rendering of precise image a form of attention to this world or a means of departure from it?\u201d Melissa Kwasny asks in Earth Recitals: Essays on Image & Vision (Lynx House, 2013). \u201cIs the non-human another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","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=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}