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5.0 out of 5 stars
Richly imaginative and elegantly crafted poems., December 14, 1996
By A Customer
This review is from: The Stillness, the Dancing: Poems (Paperback)
Linda Bierds brings something of a fiction-writer's sensibilities to her poems, which are as rich in character and narrative as they are in imagery and metaphor. Rather than drawing primarily on her own experiences, Bierds shapes her poems through the imaginative transformation of facts and legends taken from history, science, and art. She writes almost exclusively in the third person, using an omniscient narrator's voice, with no obvious "persona" we can identify as the poet. This is a somewhat risky technique, particularly when combined with the kinds of subject matter she choses, but the poems never sound "academic" or "cold" because Bierds enters so completely into the imaginative lives of her characters.
Her interests cover an impressive range: THE STILLNESS, THE DANCING includes poems about polar exploration, Rembrandt, rhodolite mining, the discovery of the rabies vaccine, and the settlement of the American west. Bierds apparently spent part of her childhood in Alaska and lived in the Pacific Northwest, and a number of these poems reflect her interest in that region's history and people.
"The Klipsan Stallions," for example, is a lyrical narrative about a shipwreck off the Pacific Coast in 1891 and the amazing rescue of its sailors by specially trained horses. Presented as a true story ("It was 3 A.M., the third of November, 1891.") and framed as a narrative, the poem is rich in vivid images and cinematic detail, and informed by Bierds' imaginatively empathetic focus on the inner lives of her characters. It begins with this description of the shipwreck: "Just one crack against the sandbar/and the grain freighter crumbled into/itself like paper in flames, all the lifeboats/and blankets, the tons of yeasty wheat/sucked down so fast" and moves quickly into the sailors' experience: " the tumbling sailors/still carried in the flat backs of their brains/the sensations of the galley, smoky with mutton fat,/someone's hiccup, someone's red woolen sleeve/still dragging itself across their eyes//even as the long sleeve of the water closed over them." Note how effectively that single-line stanza, with its echoing metaphor of the sleeve, captures the stillness and finality of their going under. Bierds is a master of such effects. Here, a bit later in the poem, she describes the setting in motion of the rescue in images that bring us completely into the scene: "there was shouting, the groan of stable doors,/and over the beachfront, a dozen/horses were running. Trained/with a bucket of timothy to swim rescue,/they passed under the beam of the Klipsan lighthouse,/passed out from the grasses, alfalfa,/deep snores and the shuffle of hooves,//and entered the black ocean." More is at stake here, however, than a vivid description of an exciting event. As the horses swim toward the terrified sailors they panic: "So this is the death parade, Neptune's/horses lashed up from Akasha!--// And still,//through some last act of the self, when/the tails floated past they grabbed on," It is that "last act of the self," or what she later calls "the long bones of the will," that drives both men and horses, "causing hands to close over those rippling tails,/yellow teeth to close over the timothy," that interests Bierds and gives the poem its resonance. Not all the poems in this volume are about dramatic events or historical figures. Bierds writes with equal grace about small moments in the lives of crab fishermen, an ex-Benedictine nun, a "cerebrally impaired" actress, and others. In the aptly titled "Wonders," she uses a quiet scene to beautifully capture the effect of a father's grief upon his children. The poem is worth quoting at some length, because it exemplifies Bierds' great gift for combining the narrative and lyric elements of poetry. It begins with an almost fictional setting of the scene: "In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children --/a girl and her younger brother -- jump marbles/on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them,/in a chair near the window, their father/thinks of his mother, her recent death//and the grief he is trying to gather./It is late October. The hooplight spreads/from the family, through the window,/to the edge of a small orchard, where/a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves/and only apples hang, heavy and still/on the branches." With great delicacy, Bierds enters the complex emotional moment occurring between the man and his children. He reads "a scrapbook of facts" from his own childhood and tells his son, "The spider is proven to have memory." The son "cocks his small face" and answers with a "guttural oh,// as if/ this is some riddle he is slowly approaching,/as if this long hour, troubled with phrases/and the queer turn in his father's voice,/is offered as a riddle." As the father continues, unable to break his grief, "plucking scraps from his old book": "There is the sound of marbles/in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery/jump of the girl's shoe/as she waits, embarrassed, for her father/to stop, to return to his known self, thick/and consistent as a family bread." But the father does not return to his "known self," and the poem ends in a moment of sorrowful suspension: "A little sleet scrapes at the window./The man blinks, sees his hand on the page/as a boy's hand, sees his children bent over/the playboard, with the careful pattern/of their lives dropping softly away, like/leaves in a sudden frost -- how the marbles/have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers,/and after each phrase the guttural/oh, and the left shoe jumping." This seems to me a consummately subtle and lovely ending. Bierds' quiet voice and her precisely imagined details -- the boy's "oh," the girl's "left shoe jumping," the "stalled, heavy" marbles -- make possible the leap to "the careful pattern/of their lives dropping softly away" and create a tender and believable scene.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Sparse yet beautiful poetry, May 8, 2000
This review is from: The Stillness, the Dancing: Poems (Paperback)
Bierds has a style that is risky, attractive, and a bit distant. Unlike most poets and most poetry, she quite often writes in the third person, narrating events of the past, touching quiet legends or legendizing every day events. There is a sense of vision here that makes me wistful, longing to know more, to enter into an old scene. However, there are still some poems that fail to capture, places where I am unable to enter in, where the details simply remain details.
Her beauty is quiet and sparse, like the snowy scene on the cover of the book. (Most fitting book cover I've ever seen -- it actually captures the style of the poetry.) Her writing takes some work -- it's not as quickly accessible as many other poets, or as a 1st person voice tends to be-- but I believe, in most cases, it is worth the work.
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