To slip through the sliver of “rain . . . silvery and singing,” you must be willing to accept the thin membrane between conscious and unconscious, the unexplored regions, the realms mystics find in quiet ecstasy. Michelle Demers’s poems have a lithe grace to them as if written by a ballet dancer. Her images sweep on the stage, bowing slightly, and then leap, suspended for a moment, before landing. You hear “. . . swishing /of willow,” “. . . air that slides down my throat / like mint,” “. . . mangoed clouds,” and “. . . spilling of a fixed porcelain light” — a sonorous luxury of words. She captures the tenderness of moments we often let pass: from “Tea with Chickadee” to the “loons . . . screeching their eerie cry through fog.” She can, however, delve into her own angst. In a quick psychological study, “Call Me by My Name,” she ponders what if her name, as those of Native Americans, were a reflection of her own spirit. “What if my name were Winter Wind?” or “At Seven . . . Slow Listening?” or “at 21, Yearning on Fire?” Using the names as a way to frame her development, she captures the “glacially slow . . . wisp of a cat hair time” that reflects how we slide out of one identity into another, how we are never entirely the same. Her meditations on nature are her finest moments poetically. In a poem, “Hydrangea in Winter,” she marries the sound with the image and the image with the elongated sentence to embody the plant
. . . plump and solitary
On a fake wooden desk, whitish,
Withered to old yellow,
Palest green, each tiny leaf
Slightly curled . . .
The plant, in turn, becomes a blossom of childhood, which carries with it memories of a “grassy path, / the moss soft and moist / beneath her feet.” This small volume has the heft of precision to make it worth a careful reading.
— Bruce Spang