{"id":391,"date":"2014-03-03T20:21:58","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T19:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/?page_id=391"},"modified":"2020-09-21T19:48:04","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T17:48:04","slug":"review-music-for-landing-planes-by","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/review-music-for-landing-planes-by\/","title":{"rendered":"Music For Landing Planes By"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My first book,\u00a0Music for Landing Planes By<\/a>,<\/em> was reviewed in lots of places (thank you, reviewers). \u00a0A favorite was a delicately observed piece written by Rebekah Sankey at\u00a0Growler<\/em> (now subsumed into Barrelhouse, although I couldn’t find the review on their site, and\u00a0Growler<\/em>\u00a0apparently no longer exists). I reproduce Sankey’s review here.<\/p>\n

music for landing planes by<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong> \/\/ Rebekah Sankey<\/p>\n

I should begin by telling you I\u2019m in love. When I reached the cover of the book I was done for. Perhaps this is a fault of mine, but it has made me willing to forgive the one fault I find with this book. The blurb on the back of Eireann Lorsung\u2019s music for landing planes by<\/i> claims its author \u201chonors the makers, methods, and materials embodied in daily objects\u201d and certainly, at surface level, that is what these poems do. But it seems to me this book is much more about the things we cannot make out of the materials of our daily lives; the connections, relationships, and wholenesses we\u2019d like to create out of the parts\u2014here, beautifully rendered, intricate elements\u2014of what we have, but is also always escaping us.<\/strong> The poems long after the city that is also the country, the fragile that will not shatter, the world that will be our home but will not let us in. It is this desire for duality, its recognition and acceptance, that holds the book together from first to last poem.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

music for landing planes by<\/i> is divided into four sections, each introduced with a quote that carefully frames the collection of poems that follow. The very first quotation, from The Gospel of Thomas<\/i>, positions us in the duality of experience: \u201c\u2026the kingdom of God is stretched out upon the earth, and people do not see it.\u201d Reality and perceived reality are quite at odds in this little world. \u201cBeing,\u201d the poem which follows makes use of this understanding. Lorsung writes of birds \u201cacross distance I can\u2019t conceive.\u201d Her careful positioning of this line\u2014slightly off-center right, the final line of the first stanza\u2014illustrate the effective consciousness of the content\/form relationship that characterizes these poems. \u201cConceive\u201d plays the role of two characters. The distances are both impossible to understand and to be impregnated with; she cannot make sense of or internalize the world\u2019s duality.<\/p>\n

This skillful manipulation of line continues in the following stanzas. \u201cAsh is in the air. \/ Every place I\u2019ve been \/ is on fire with words.\u201d We perceive that everything is suddenly true and untrue. \u201cEvery place\u201d is simultaneously burnt and burning. It is this line-conscious particularity that gives these poems a sense of order, a neatness that drives me wild with delight. I feel, as a reader, as though I might substitute reading the book for a multitude of chores and tasks: when I am with these poems my house feels clean. They are stitched, they are well-formed<\/strong>, they are handcrafted.<\/p>\n

This sense of order balances the poems\u2019 duality, which might otherwise feel chaotic. Lorsung\u2019s contradiction is consistent.<\/strong> We become content knowing, as the speaker does in \u201cThe Way to Really Love It,\u201d that \u201csomething will begin \/ or something will stop happening,\u201d which in either case is action. And so we begin to root ourselves in opposing ideas simultaneously, finding their commonalities rather than losing ourselves in the opposition.<\/strong> We are prepared for the two sides of every coin, for the action in \u201cAnd Will Be:\u201d<\/p>\n

They take up yes and no and do not rest
\non a single answer. My students
\nwant everything, both, they urge into the classroom
\nsaying what if<\/em> to their own minds\u2026<\/p>\n

I want to climb into their wolf bodies
\nand live there while they relearn
\n<\/span>the world, deleting binary.<\/p>\n

Because we are becoming more familiar with the singularity of what appears \u201cbinary,\u201d we recognize the way in which even this assertion does not undermine the claims of the poems. Two parallel lines later, in separate stanzas, highlight this: \u201cin some darkness. Nothing,\u201d \u201cinto that darkness. Sound\u201d. The same darkness can contain different elements, just as the same poems, stanzas, even here lines, beg us to allow them to contain both.<\/p>\n

For all this careful writing, Lorsung does not let her language suffer. These are poems beautiful, often accessible, handed to the reader lovingly, even expectantly.<\/p>\n

Nothing touches like tan velvet touches
\nthe palm. Now the cracks come, because what gives
\n<\/span>without taking?\u2014Doesn\u2019t exist. say<\/p>\n

you forget what is lanolin, what is raw about fleece
\nuncarded & unwashed. Say the silver feel
\nof charmeuse lines your sleep.<\/p>\n

We are gifted \u201cflying fish \/ Biplanes in a water-green world,\u201d \u201cthe soft musk of thyme,\u201d \u201cAll the parallel birches.\u201d We are welcomed to sit and watch, to be among the coming and going of the world of this book, its little city as it goes along with its daily business.<\/p>\n

But always we are privy to the contradiction, invited to enquire after how it really is doing,<\/i> the way one needs to search out the thoughts of some good friends after a long separation. And the book does not hesitate to share with us, I\u2019m a little tired, I\u2019m a little confused,<\/i> \u201cNothing can question nighttime, \/ how stars scatter like birds or seeds\u2026 \/ Except beauty. Except nights\u2026\u201d The poems are conscious of their own vacillations, conscious, too, of the page.<\/p>\n

Lorsung makes good use of space, often separating, leaving room to breathe where one might not expect. She is unafraid of punctuation, of teaching us how to move within the space she creates, referencing this both in content and form in \u201cThe One You Love:\u201d<\/p>\n

in air I would part
\nthese elements to bring him
\n<\/span>to you, so late as sweet, as bitter as almonds
\nafter hours in the dry air\u2014<\/p>\n

There is something almost Dickinsonian in the tenderness with which these poems are presented, something about the cautious presentation of the self, the way the speaker might bend over backwards to bring you what you love.<\/strong> And so she pleads with the reader, \u201c(- – -, make me all syntactic beauty \/ \u2026& please Sir, may I know\u2014” and as a reader, I feel entitled to give her even her last wish as the books ends. To recognize all the multiplicity of my world, to see it and grasp it and love it and \u201cgo on \/ and on let it yes let it.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first book,\u00a0Music for Landing Planes By, was reviewed in lots of places (thank you, reviewers). \u00a0A favorite was a delicately observed piece written by Rebekah Sankey at\u00a0Growler (now subsumed into Barrelhouse, although I couldn’t find the review on their site, and\u00a0Growler\u00a0apparently no longer exists). I reproduce Sankey’s review here. music for landing planes by\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-391","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":566,"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/391\/revisions\/566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohbara.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}