Human, Earth, I
A review by Mary Cisper
“Blue Pearl,” Lesley Harrison
New Directions, 2017
2017, 47 pages, softcover, $10.95
There are persistent holes all over Lesley Harrison’s recent collection, “Blue Pearl,” and some of them are anatomical: “each tiny throat / a hole in the wind.” Does such a throat make a sound? In this collection, it’s not just that we find ourselves in some of Earth’s northernmost regions—Svalbard, Iceland, the Orkneys, Greenland, the European sub-Arctic—it’s that such encounters may include what we cannot hear. (Re-reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s the “Duino Elegies”: “With all its eyes the natural world looks out / into the Open.”) Here, the North may be a vast body where a glacier is subject to wounding, and red holes in turf moan “bare vowels that fill the mouth like lichen.” The vast Open—does it answer back?
In the ears of the human listener, “voicings” of place proclaim a primal language: “sea glass hissing all round us”; geese making “pure word sounds / for grass and meltwater.” Although “Bird Song”—“heather bleater, myre drum”—may be the poet’s most explicit (and humorous) excursion into soundscape, the whole collection rides on voice—Harrison’s own, of course—and, paradoxically, its cancellation by terrain humans have often turned back from (or been swallowed by). A weather-exposed map is described as “old words silvering in daylight / unprinting – the action of silence.” “Blue Pearl” knows silence is the deepest sound.
And perhaps where absence is powerfully felt, an accurate human record of the remote consists of fragments. “When you start imposing form and sentences and grammar on what you’re trying to describe,” Harrison comments in a recent interview with Daniel Poppick, “it takes you further and further away from the experience of the thing itself.” Harrison’s fragments are carefully selected crystals. Embodying qualities visual, tactile, and aural, the image of glass recurs, suggesting more than beauty: brittleness, fragility, meetings with otherness—for example, polar campion, “a glass bloom /intravenous white,” and sei whale membranes lining the walls of huts, “thin and transparent.”
Informed by historical, naturalist, and literary materials—ranging from 15th century Icelandic rune-poems to 19th century whaling and sealing journals to Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 fairy tale, “The Snow Queen”—”Blue Pearl” is an immersive, faceted experience. If there’s a common subtext in these materials, perhaps it’s the pathos of keenly observed encounters with the mysterious, the sublime. Rune poems may have served as mnemonic devices for recalling the runic alphabet while promoting cultural continuity. Harrison’s contemporary versions question memory and certainty while continuing the trope of the fragmentary:
aporia a butterfly, the black-veined white
an open wound
a point of undecidability
Although discrete narrative moments break through—most intensely in the borrowed account of sailors attacking a “sea horse” with pups—“the imposition of narrative” (one of the fragments defining “border” in “Rune Poems”) is more often subsumed “in great white darkness.” In “Blue Pearl,” place (“a true north, drawn by erasure”) is the actor, and birds, wind, ice, are first speakers in its frozen palace.
A zone where the task of human movement requires constant negotiation with elementary forces is a meeting place of legend and tragedy—for example, the Northeast Passage, the long-sought shipping route along the Norwegian and Russian coasts to the Pacific. Perhaps, the West holds these forays for fame and profit in its bones. In one section of the long poem, “The Voyages of William Barents,” the word “cold” repeats in every line, forming a spine. Fragments of human observation hang off it, “know[ing] not what to think.” (Rilke, again: “Who has twisted us around like this, so that / no matter what we do, we are in the posture / of someone going away?”)
Inspired by Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke’s 2010 “Arctic Hysteria” installation which examined the European colonization of Inuit peoples, Harrison just once allows the “I” emphatic expression. Responding to a film Arke made of herself crawling naked over, sniffing, investigating, and then shredding, a large photo of Nuugaarsuk Point where she had lived for a time, Harrison’s poem, titled “Nude,” declares, opposes, declaims:
I am not naked as I am; I am naked as you see me. I am transparent,
almost visible. I have a time and a place. I am tribal and exotic. I must
always carry objects. You are heroic. I am a complete museum, the
story of my own making. […]
The eros of colliding with collective projection questions the fogged mirror of human consciousness. “Northness” may be the deepest void humans project on our planet. And maybe a glacier is a body “growing open wounds / of violet, emerald, silver.” Ascribing consciousness to the sea and to campion, a tundra flower, the book’s speaker aligns with both the immensity and intelligence of the environment. What does it know and are we capable of respecting that knowledge? Perhaps “environment” is too prosaic a word, and maybe place has its own memory it works to keep afloat. Of course, the histories and mythos of a place loop back to work on human visitors. Speaking to interrelationship, to interpenetrability, Harrison refers in the Poppick interview to “psychoecology,” by which I think she means our emotional and spiritual response to place.
Undoubtedly, the North has its archetypes (and clichés) indigenous, intrepid, rapacious, fabulous. Under snow and ice, a stratum of myth exists, some part creaturely (as embodied in the opening poem, “Angel,”); some part historic (the poems that borrow from accounts of polar voyages); and some part faerie (here, the archaic spelling feels more appropriate). For one of the (for now) less-encroached upon and fraught locations on Earth, Roberto Calasso’s observation about myth feels especially apropos: “we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments.” At book’s end, we encounter Andersen’s Snow Queen, but only glancingly; perhaps through alchemy, the angel has been transformed: “her spasms of fur / her whole body breathing.” Instead of the expected tale, characters (or are they subjects?)—including the town, south, and thaw—are limned, as in the notes of a play. Perhaps in this place, the noteworthy is the psychic impress long resident. Or is this a play about the play? Or about endurance of the erasures?
The present occurs and occurs
(a simple arrangement of time
when part of the story is missing).
What changes await this pearl (“blue – the color of nothing”)? Harrison’s poems don’t explicitly visit climate change impacts already occurring. These observant poems know more than we do. One of “The Snow Queen” sections offers a moment (poignant? ironic?): “How easily our grief grows old! / How seamlessly the wound closes over!”
I will probably never visit these places, but Harrison’s work re-awakens them in my concern. Always, she finds a resonant language and form—“Here and not here, / the way clouds vanish in the mirror”—that act upon the reader delicately and viscerally:
as arctic terns
clothe themselves in lightso that rising
they vanish
One last quote from RMR: “Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us, / invisible?” Rilke sounds a deeply touched note for encounters such as this—with vanishing, with silence. Harrison’s speaker, however, seems less the interpreter, and more the listener—in “rooms filling with feathers.”
That there is much to appreciate (and mourn) in reading “Blue Pearl” makes it a collection to savor and share. I thank Lesley Harrison for giving us these poems; New Directions, of course, for their pamphlet series; and poet friends who correctly predicted I would love this work. The pleasure and paradox of these seamless poems is that they feel unfiltered, full of pure hearing—an environmental recording that acknowledges human history yet gives place the last word.
Mary Cisper’s poems have appeared in Lana Turner, PoetryNow, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ZYZZYVA, Newfound, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her first collection, “Dark Tussock Moth,” won the 2016 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press (2017). She lives in northern New Mexico.