It’s always a bit awkward reviewing local poets that I can conceivably encounter in public. The stakes somehow feel higher and that I need to offer a more thoughtful review. I hope I can do justice to Candace de Taeye’s Small Planes and the Dead Fathers of Lovers. It’s a collection of poems divided into a few sections. The first is the titular section, followed by “Blue Collar, Red Hood,” “I, House,” and “For Sale – An Addendum.” The first section recounts relationships marred by tragedy, the second is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, the third an extended metaphor of house and heart, and the final is a reflection on selling a home and moving away.
One of the early standouts in the collection is the poem “Alice” which sets the scene with an opening couplet: “the isolation of finches made famous the tiny islands / evolving independently on the dead ends of rural roads” (5). The poem then describes a budding relationship, where “she was kind, his second choice,” sort of a bleak thought, but followed up with tenderness: “but 60 years later he learned to cook / for her.” The poem describes the relationship between the speaker and the central figure of the poem: “she once scolded me, my dirt bike scaring off migratory birds and a / lost racing pigeon” (5). de Taeye follows up the line with a gorgeous and evocative turn of phrase: “I crafted a wreath of limp songbirds out of spite” (5). The images that follow offer a cohesive package: “gravestones spring up, granite volcanoes, ashes buried” (5). She refers back to “the first choice and the pilot son-in-law” and then comments on “maps discretely embroidered into bomber jacket linings” (5), which again is a great image to offer insight into characters at a glance. In discussing his ashes, “that summer we smoked his humidor clean” (5). I like that poem in particular because it establishes such a rich backstory for the characters in just a short set of lines.
The poem “Green Screen” shares in the strength of “Alice,” offering rich turns of phrase alongside a clear and distinct narrative. The opening lines alone are excellent: “the passage of time layered semi transparent. every boy I’ve ever / kissed here at some point along the trail. Land marking epochs” (7). I’m a sucker for conversations about time and the storied memories that are implied just below the surface. The poem continues, “unspooled familiar static pulling my foot beats along a magnetic cas- / sette ribbon retraced near daily for two dogs or 20 years” (7). I like how de Taeye proposes different methods for measuring time: the standard, years, and the uncommon—dogs. The idea of walking on memories like an unspooled magnetic cassette ribbon is a great image, particularly because of the magnetism implied in traveling the path. Plus, the very image is a callback to an obsolete technology—from roughly 20 years ago, appropriately. The notion of a “green screen” referenced in the title is not the filmic backdrop, but the natural world: “occasionally I’m still present here but most days it’s faded / some would argue the forest is always a background” (7). From there, the narrator comments on taking photos, the most used feature on the camera being macro and she frames the light while taking pictures of small things, like spiders and mushrooms. You’ll notice some similar language to “Alice” in the final lines—ash, maps, tiny islands: “I file away a cache of maps, sand, ashes and tiny rocks of significance / from this forest and all the tiny islands to come” (7).
One of the highlights and challenges of the collection is that there are such echoes and connections between poems. The benefit is that, when reading the collection as a whole, the poems elevate one another. The downside is that some of the poems don’t really ‘work’ when taken out of context. Such an example is in the poem “proprioception”, which recounts a definition in a terse four lines:
from Latin proprius
meaning “one’s own” “individual” and perception
is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body
relating to stimuli produced and perceived within an organism (48)
This poem provides a good idea for an unclear word, and taken on its own would be unlikely to stir up much emotion. It’s only when taking a look at the following poem, “exoskeleton,” that proprioception serves its purpose. “exoskeleton” talks about “steadily / becoming your body // not just a heart / this space an extension / of your experience // nourish and entertain yourself / inside me / beloved parasite //// I can insulate a nude /unkempt/sickly you //// as I breath [sic?] with seasons / floors and window panes adjusting” (49). We’re going to get a little bit complex here. First, we ought to recognize that these poems appear in the “I, House” section of the collection. The start of “I, House” replaces the phrase “Home is where the heart is” by saying that the heart is the home. So, here, the metaphor is about a house growing around the resident, the “parasite.” So, we see proprioception in action, where the house reacts to its internal stimuli and grows around it, “floors and window panes adjusting” to the resident’s breathing. Without the context of the proprioception poem, the “exoskeleton” would not really stand on its own—conceptually, it’s a brilliant move.
I think what prevented me from being fully immersed in the collection is some of the ambiguity that arises when connections are missing. This sometimes happens at the level of the sentence, where the connective tissue of punctuation and conjunctions has been removed, progressing in a more impressionistic mode. For me, I found some of this presentation more perplexing than necessary. I’ll try to offer an example here with the poem “salmon tangent,” where there are some areas of connective tissue that appear to me to be missing or ambiguous:
no one is watching you
tossing ghost dimes
to the koi/carp/no salmon
against the current
dragons
change into golden rolls
demons drunk
neighbor - H- - - - - - -!
increases the height of the
falls often slur dam(n) the potential
buyers wishing phrased right of way
100 years takes over 3 months
most fish are retracing a
couple straying up/changing shape/getting desperate
falling a part a little maki at the local sushi place one last time (61)
To be clear, there are actually a number of things I like about the poem and I think the central idea is clear. There are several parts of the poem, though, where there is an ambiguous connection between clauses that I don’t think serves the poem very well, although perhaps it plays into the idea that buyers’ expectations are inconsistent. For example, the “koi/carp/no salmon” is ambiguous. Is the ‘no’ an interruption that corrects to salmon, or is it saying there is no salmon? With the word “current,” it is unclear whether that is a noun or an adjective. The noun would make sense, contextually. As an adjective, it could also be that there are current dragons that are changing into something new. Similarly, when talking about “the “demons drunk,” similarly it’s unclear if it’s being used as a verb or a noun. Towards the end, “increases the height of the // falls often slur dam(n) the potential / buyers wishing phrased right of way” is very obscure to me. The falls might be little waterfalls in the pond. I don’t know what to make of “buyers wishing phrased right of way.” I do like the twist at the end that moves by association from a koi pond to visiting the local sushi place before moving away. It’s darkly comic and I like it.
Speaking of darkly comic, there’s a poem in the collection called “a wedding” that is similar to Margaret Atwood’s fish hook poem in both tenor and delivery. de Taeye writes, “Maimed birds carried over the threshold / concussed brides in the maw of the cat through the dog’s door” (42).
All this to say that sometimes the poems felt more obscure than I would have liked. Even when referring to the love interests in the poems there are “The Arborist” and “The Actor”. Other characters are named, so I don’t see why they couldn’t have been given names—it felt weirdly mythic, and it just didn’t land for me in that respect.
Overall, there are some really brilliant moves in the collection that demonstrate an ambitious poetic vision. Maybe it’s my own jealousy, but sometimes the poems just seem too high brow for my own understanding, so the collection didn’t consistently resonate with me. Still, I’m happy to know that I live amongst such ambitious and thoughtful poets.
Happy reading, everybody!
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