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Fence Above the Sea
by Brigitte Byrd

Ahsahta Press, 2005.
Poetry, 96 pp.
Paperback.
$16

Reviewed by Alexis M. Smith

 

Brigitte Byrd’s Fence Above the Sea begins with a death. “The Requiem Series” opens the book with the anticipation of loss, then the loss itself, in the dream-like suspension of time that accompanies the passing of a life. The life in question belongs to a father, and the speaker of the linked prose poems is his daughter. Repetition of words and phrases, and parallel structure create a steady rhythm in the poems, as in the first poem, “(a breath)”: “The daughter sleeps in the house which is empty without the father who sleeps and sleeps and slips. It will be mine. And she is mine.” The lilting refrain, “And then, there is another day,” seems to draw deep breath after deep breath into the breaks between the poems, creating a sense that the speaker must will herself to return to the living body and tend to the ways of the world. The book continues with daily life rendered in abstract tableaux. The sensual details are both arrestingly beautiful and haunting: “She liked all the paintings and things hanging from the walls and these were lovely cats. When she had something to write she often lost it in a cup of bouillon or between soiled towels.” “Decorative Emptiness,” the title of one of the final pieces, is an apt phrase for the absence that accompanies the objects and scenes of these poems. In it we learn that “If she says she is a writer she must write and it is a lonely place to announce.” The act of writing is often a process of remembering, of starting in solitude and calling back a time and a place. Byrd brilliantly portrays the artist seeking out memory and making a language of it, making a pattern and narrative of the mind’s accumulations.


Alexis M. Smith is the Reviews Editor for Tarpaulin Sky.