Asakiyume mita

The problem I have with poems and stories that I like is that I keep wanting to read people good lines or passages for them, and it’s very easy to end up reading them the whole thing. It’s like giving a person a present, except you’re so excited about the present that you start unwrapping it for them, excitedly pointing out all its special features. I will try not to do that with Sonya’s most recent collection (poetry plus a novelette) BUT IT WILL BE HARD.

With Sonya, you’re never far away from the sea, history, or mythology, and those themes flow through the poems (and vice versa—mutual flowing). The first, “Dive,” describes the sea-change that happens in a bar when everyone is deep in their cups, how

the sea-fog
coils in through cigarettes
and the students are crying on each other’s shoulders
like gulls

how

lost ships sail back out of their bottles

and

plankton glimmers as the house lights dim

In the “The Coast Guard,” the narrator feels the presence of a ghost-ship, washed up on the winter sand. Others on the shore include “a dog, two beachcombers… a camera-flash flurry of tourists”—all unaware. This poem came to me aurally: the hish and rattle of marram and beach plum … the haul and hail of voices.

The narrator of “The Parable of the Albatross” feels kinship with that great bird, more so than with the small songbirds of northern fields and forests, and declares:

Only the stranger who can match me dancing
and meet me balanced on the endless arc of air
will hear the deeper breath I take, unfolding
the full span of my ambition.

And then the poems pivot to history: “Firebrands” and “Colonial,” about the burden of ancestry, and “Capta,” an Ozymandias of sorts for Emperor Vespasian, who struck coins to boast of the capture of Judaea.

After those come four that prepare readers for the novelette in that they feature lovers—the groom among the gravestones in “He Should Marry the Daughter of the Angel of Death,” a daydreaming couple in “qe-ra-si-ja” (the title is a transliteration of Linear B script representing an epithet of Artemis) who imagine living a timeless life:

You will learn the weaving of eel-baskets,
swim with the sponge divers and haul out
shaking water thick as bronze from your seal’s hair.

It’s rare to see couples lazing together contentedly in Sonya’s work with no threat on the horizon, and yet here the happiness is rich and concrete. I lingered in this harbor.

In “Σειρήνοιϊν” (the title means “of the two sirens” in Homeric Greek), a siren offers a grief-stricken lover a choice:

Take the fruit from my hand [or] Take the song from my mouth

One choice is sleep and forgetting; the other is truth, shared.

The last poem, “The Secret Language of Water,” has

the drowned and the moonstruck
in the gyre of history
dreaming their shoreward roads
with maps wet as handkerchiefs,

the perfect lead-in to the novelette, “As the Tide Came Flowing In,” in which Ezra, a drowned sailor, finds his way back to his wife Elizabeth not once but twice, pulled to her like the ocean by the moon, prompting her to wonder

if a satellite had ever disowned its ocean, if the great weight and restlessness of waters rejected would go slack.

Pairs of lovers in Sonya Taaffe stories are marked by difference that makes a separation: one is a mortal, another a ghost, a dybbuk, a metamorphosis. The story is in how and when they reach for each other and how and when they turn away, and where in the dance Sonya stops the music. This time it’s with a role-reversing promise, and a counter promise: satisfying.

I’ll leave you with the items Ezra lays out on Lizzie’s bed: atonements, or protective talismans, or maybe a kind of map:

the rough fist of ambergris … then a square-rigged ship soot-inked into a polished tooth, then a seal of black soapstone… a handful of pearls dripping with salt-black mud … a round-bellied bottle streaked green as the plunge of a wave. Silver dollars jumbled with sand dollars, brown-inked logbook pages interleaved with dark plates of baleen. Whale stamps, stick charts, looped strands of pink jade.

You want to touch them, right? You can—just pick up the book ;-)

Regret, sorrow, obsession, and yearning are so present in Forget the Sleepless Shores that it’s almost like they’re main characters. The human (and otherworldly) protagonists caught in their clutches often find words failing them—so light must speak, or clouds, or objects, or landscapes, but most of all, bodies must speak, skin to skin, sweat to sweat, intermingled breath, hands tangling in hair or gripping wrists. It’s sensuousness with an incandescent filament of the erotic threading through it, surrounded by the glowing unknowable.

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The collection hits the marketplace tomorrow. That means you can still be ahead of the game and preorder now—here’s an Amazon link. Or, if you prefer, you can check out the book’s page at Lethe Press, the publisher.