New Review of Sturgeon’s TREES

Occasionally, the most surprising (and rewarding) reviews arrive months after a book’s release. Take this review of Stephen Sturgeon’s TREES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, thoughtfully written by Lisa Katz and published in The Quarterly Conversation, it came out yesterday, September 6th, six months after Sturgeon’s book was released:

Sturgeon’s poetry is fueled by this tension between circumstantial accident and individual imagination. In the opening poem, “Confabulators,” the speaker asks, “What do you speak after penguins enter / the trembling bear-baiting ring?” In other words, how do we attempt to explain the accidental, the unexplainable, using language? The choice of penguins and a bear-baiting ring seems random, and “trembling” is a bizarre way to describe an inanimate object. But the answer is in the title: we confabulate. The title describes both those who talk informally and those who replace fact with fantasy in their memory. Thus we create a new reality through language whenever we speak or write.

It’s encouraging to see a book discussed six months into its existence. A dollop of optimism settles and one remembers that if the book deserved to be published in the first place, and if the book is a meaningful contribution to the world of poetry, and if the book’s words and lines mingle in the public mind long enough, then maybe, just maybe, the book will breach the walls of an overly saturated marketplace and, even six months in, hit the ground running.

Here’s more from Katz:

But lest we forget that the poems are not drawn entirely from the metaphysical world, Sturgeon also makes the material world very much present. The material objects in these poems have a remarkable vitality and autonomy, and they make us think of larger, less tangible concepts, as in “Lines”: “when nothing is wasted/like when the sink drinks/water your glass missed.” The sink and the glass are not static and acted upon; rather, they both have agency, and they work in tandem to show that the nothing ever goes entirely to waste. Objects in Sturgeon’s poems are also capable of transformation. In “I Forget What You Say,” the wall, the shells, and the wreck are all part of the background: “The sealine mumbles up its binges, / scraps of a yellow wall bed down/with shells corroding on a wreck of shoals.” These become some of the makings of a human being in the following poem, “1996 Snow Ball”:

He like a wall built
from the remains of sixteen
previous walls,
for his life there’s a light bulb a trash can a

medium sized railroad spike a mirror
with goldflake fringe a chair with bone
inlay a safety switch a fire ax,

and “I have banned such plan
as would commemorate her entry
unless she trail a train of shell

Here the years are walls, built from the debris and detritus of the subject’s past. Only fragments of objects that were once whole become part of the person; on a chronological journey, as on a physical one, you can’t take everything with you. Sturgeon’s poems are conspicuous not only for what is included but for what is left out or partially hidden from view, for the questions left unanswered. Why the Victorian furniture juxtaposed with the light bulb and trash can? What is the quotation doing there? And why the sudden appearance of an “I,” when nowhere else in the poem is the speaker’s presence apparent? While more gradual and logical transitions would perhaps be illuminating, the lack thereof gives the reader a sense of disorientation that mirrors that of the two adolescents whose relationship the poem describes.

Read the entire review at The Quarterly Conversation, and then purchase TREES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY from Dark Sky Books.