Renée Ashley
Two-Headed Nightingale
By Shara Lessley
Shara Lessley’s debut is a marvelous frustration you really must read, though it’s one which, if you’re much like me, will spin your expectations until you’re woozy with recalculation.
First books often feel so much like . . . first books. More than a pocketful have that oh-boy-I’ve-gathered-all-the-poems-I’ve-written-and-now-I’ve-got-a-book feel along with the my-strongest-work’s-in-the-front-and-you’ll-be-so-wowed-by-that-you-won’t-notice-I-stuck-the-weaker-ones-in-the-middle formula that’s become the standard. Bottom line: First books too often feel like a motley of apprentice-writer phases and accumulated MFA assignments squeezed between covers rather than a cohesive whole, a unified book with a vision.
And I’ll admit there is a faint ghost of those first-book-shaping heuristics in Two-Headed Nightingale, though it’s not an issue of strong versus weak at all. Make no mistake: The execution and vision of this book are to be admired and learned from. But because I’m so interested in the arc of work over the period of a book’s composition or of a poet’s writing life—and because those observations are so integral to how I understand this particular book—it seems imperative that I say up front that these poems appear to be drawn from a much longer writing apprenticeship than most first books, a period through which the poet herself wrote well but from markedly different levels of maturity. If I’m correct, it’s a fascinating trajectory: The craft always strong; the writer changing. Right or wrong, it feels like a book by which you can track the path of its author, the way a meteorologist might track the path of a storm.
My favorite poem of the collection, in fact a contender for one of my favorite poems of the year, or maybe even the decade, is the very first, “Fallen Starling.” It’s masterful, literally breathtaking, and doesn’t lose its pow! after repeated readings.
The poems that follow that brilliant starter are decidedly different but not decidedly less. The turn-of-mind and level of craft demonstrated throughout (with one notable exception) is pretty fabulous. And if it took me far too long to find my footing in her book, it’s not Lessley’s fault. Her titular bird should have given me more than a hint about the astonishments I would find: The bird has two heads, for heaven’s sake.
But I was slow to catch on. Bird in the volume title, bird in the first poem: a set-up for a nice little book of bird poems, I thought. And I do like a nice little bird poem. And so my expectations were measured as such. But in the reading of Two-Headed Nightingale, as opposed to the presumption of my expectations, I was taken aback frequently by what felt like seismic shifts between poems or sets of poems. I began to distrust both the book and myself.
“Fallen Starling” was written with a scalpel. It is that keen. And I got stuck there, reading and rereading, setting the book down, and then rereading again. The poem had already changed me, sharpened my concept of clean and of effective, given me a new benchmark for streamlined, given both my emotions and my intellect something hard and resonant to ponder. And so, those twenty-four short lines that made up that first descriptive piece, ostensibly detailing the desiccated corpse of a not only real but single-headed bird, raised my bird-book expectations exponentially.
A starling, larger than a big sparrow and smaller than a small crow, is a member of a destructive, invasive species introduced to the States from the U.K., oddly enough during the lifetime of the historical Two-Headed Nightingale. It’s a nuisance bird now, flocking in huge numbers, its thousand-voice choirs often heard roiling in the tallest trees at dusk. That Lessley has taken a single starling from the vast hordes and, in such detail, described its postmortem condition, and then turned that around to reflect on us all, carries with it at least a bucketful of lessons—several poetic and philosophical among them. “Fallen Starling” is a poem so perfectly tuned, so absolutely airless and clean, that I’m tempted to call it a pure poem. Even the miniscule bit of backstory of the dead bird (that it was “driven to land”) is set out so compactly, precisely, and lyrically, gruesomely and beautifully—and with such weighted lines and downward thrust—that both the bird’s depiction and the poet’s effective design are rendered unambiguously clear.(1) Here is the first stanza of “Fallen Starling”:
Driven to land like light
it is unmade—or rather
made into something other:
Because poems are linear, and detail as well as effect must accrete over time, and because the two words of the title supply the subject/context/situation of the poem, that first speeding line can astonish the reader with the powerful and initial verbal, driven, and then break, with only three quick syllables in between, on the word that surprises most: light. The second line rapidly sums up the bird’s terrible damage—it is unmade—and sets up the rhetorical suspension that introduces the notion of the reconsideration. The next line will clarify and open up the precise rendering of that re-visioned damage that is also the manner in which the remainder of the poem will unfold. The third line makes a rhetorical pleat, a perceptual re-evaluation of that initial, posited damage. There is no respite from the poem’s downward movement even at the end of the first stanza where the reader feels the snug, sonic union of the two end rhymes (rather, other) making these two lines inseparable. Then the colon comes along and throws the reader forward and down to the second stanza in which the exquisite catalog begins.
the bird so new its skull
tells its secret—bone-
cap clear as blown glass
The sonics, rich though subtle, in this stanza, are so closely woven that the reader doesn’t have a prayer of hindering or escaping its resulting profluence. The s’s are slithering throughout; the hard k sounds spread out as well; and l’s are circumnavigating those same, inextricable lines: two in the line-end skull; two in the line-beginning tells; and then the three, beautifully spaced, in the last line of the stanza, “cap clear as blown glass”—each of those three in the second position of stressed words. Reading this stanza is like smoothly drawing out the ends of the black silk drawstring of a little velvet reticule so that it closes tightly but without locking shut.
Lessley’s compression is radical. Even the punctuation forces the reader down the page at a fevered pace, the first full stop not occurring until the first line of the fourth stanza, sac of pigment (“/ sac of pigment. Body east; /”) with its period tucked in right after the t of pigment—those velars (c, g) and plosives (p, t) popping to rival the bang-bang-bang of the line’s end, Bod-y east, with its semi-colon’s pause setting those abrupt little blasts off by its silence.
The tercets are relentless: urgent, airless, and solid. The voice of controlled astonishment aligned with image, literal and figurative, are so powerful that the reader cannot look away, can’t not listen. And if, as Janet Burroway explains in Imaginative Writing(2), sense materials, images like those that Lessley excels in, are processed in the brain’s limbic system and ignite the physiological responses which are emotional responses, then a reader’s emotional stakes in this poem are already extraordinarily high—and what should be ghastly and gruesome is not. It is, instead, crystalline and mesmerizing.
Let me say it again: “Fallen Starling” is nearly pure. Nothing fussy, nothing lightweight. Nothing tricky, nothing wasted. No air, plenty of forceful movement. Even its downward trajectory and silences are loaded, and the swift, cheerless closure (which I refuse to spoil) will turn you around and make you take it all in again from the top.
It’s no surprise, then, that my expectations for the rest of the little-bird-book rose exponentially and I became concerned: Will I be able to bear a whole book of such intensity? I really had my doubts. But when I finally pulled myself away from that initial piece and moved on, I found the second poem’s tactics were nothing like the first’s and the poem equally as consuming. It’s another excellent poem, its excellence manifested in such a dissimilar manner that I was able to leave the world of the first and enter that of the second without experiencing any cross-wiring interference. I entered wholly and easily. And then my expectations, of course, were tossed to the midden all over again.
That second poem, “Captive,” is another example of the hard-look category, but this one moves externally only until the closure, where it shifts to the interior realm of the speaker. This poem is filled with air and white space: couplets, the second line of each indented about ten spaces.
Locked inside my window,
a cicada plodded above a death fieldof insects: two bees, four flies,
a dark basket resembling a spider. How itgot stuck there, I couldn’t say
though it clung to the ledge, then fell
White light on the page after the first line, as the second line creates the floor of its white space; white light on the page before the second line where it runs along the ceiling of the previous line; then the double-white bars of its eleven stanza breaks. The enjambments are mostly annotated rather than fevered, and there’s a softness to this poem, both tonally and dynamically, that contrasts dramatically with the previous poem’s clean, mean efficiency. The efficiency of “Captive” is evident and intact—it’s a fabulous poem—but it redefines efficiency at a slower pace, in a looser, more discursive syntax.
In the poem, the speaker tries multiple times to free the cicada trapped inside her window screen, but, in the end, simply cannot. Her desire to free it, then, soon becomes subordinate to the irritation of its piercing song. In a tone of chilling satisfaction, and in another sideswipe at the reader’s expectations, she states:
I let it die, and it felt
good to let it. The death, proof of my consequence,or that I might be
capable of love, if only to withhold it.
It’s a turn so brutal that, for the reader, the speaker might as well have slammed the window casing down on the creature, and yet the brutality is couched in thought—in revelation, really—rather than deed. Its impact is more forceful for the elegance of that legerdemain.
“Fallen Starling” and “Captive” are so mature and skillfully wrought that reading them for the first few times was like being led by an invisible though trustworthy hand through a dense, uneven wood. Still, trustworthy hand or no, I could not see the path I was following and had to gingerly feel my way along. I reread those two poems at least half a dozen times and then set the book aside and thought, How can this be?
When I finally read the volume straight through, I was knocked off balance even again by what seemed to be its stubborn and perplexing ability to be both different and the same. For many more days than it should have taken, I could not put my finger on what was throwing me off, making me stumble while trying to pin down my reaction to and assessment of the entirety of her remarkable and curious first book. I’d think: Why does the ground here seem so uneven? Why don’t my feet touch down as securely on each parcel of her territory as they should? And until I stripped my considerations down to something nearer an X-ray than nakedness, I couldn’t see it. But then I could and it was basic. It rested in the relationships between material, matter, and manner.
For clarity’s sake let me explain my take on the difference between material and matter.(3) If this is old news, please forgive me.
One aspect that helps a poem be a good poem is the inclusion of at least two working levels, one visible and one invisible. You may hear this division articulated in any number of ways: the literal and the figurative, the concrete and the abstract, and, even sometimes, the sensibilia and the sense. I think of it in terms of material and matter. The material of a poem is what’s visible, the images you use, the story you tell, the thought you articulate—the what-you-actually-write-down.
Matter, on the other hand, is what’s invisible, what the poem means, the larger issue at hand, the abstraction at the heart of the emotional core that is evoked rather than articulated—the what-you-really-write-about.
It works like this: For a reader, the matter of a poem is the abstract framing transmitted via the local experience of the material—as though the poet has created a very concrete, very visible little neighborhood (the material) through which she leads the reader on foot—right through the center of it, poor reader picking the literal gravel from her shoe. In other words, matter (invisible) takes on the form of material (visible) and is manifested for the reader by the poet in a particular manner (style or method).
It seemed clear to me that Lessley’s poems did not vary so much in quality (with that one startling exception that I will get to soon) but in the maturity of the speaker’s outlook and choice of material, the poems’ stuff of story, their first and obvious meanings if you will, and the inclusiveness of recognition did vary greatly and in more than just a topical way—they varied in the more profound manner of approach to the deeper meaning, the matter. The matter is consistent; except in the youngest of the poems, the deepest, unspoken emotional core is loss. It’s the little towns of material and design and paint jobs of manner that vary so greatly and the elements of which are remixed throughout the volume while still allowing for familiarity that’s sometimes a bit confounding. For example, the binding element of motif—birds, of course, literal and figurative, and their wings, but also the act of hard looking, at the mechanics of the body, the contexts of flora, fauna, and the metaphor of the simple machine and of stitching and unstitching—all work as manifestations of her silk drawstrings tying things together, creating a cozy material surface of likeness.
I am tempted to do a close reading of all the poems in this section—of the entire collection, really—but I’m going to leap to the last poem, “Wintering,” which begins, “Already, winter makes a corpse of things.” I take up my examination here because the line gives me a sort of right-brain whiplash, where the rightness of each phoneme sucks the wind right out of my lungs. What an image, what an astounding opening line! And what an incredible, artful way to draw the quickness of winter’s arrival and the thoroughness of its effect. A lesser poet, I think, if she could have conjured that line at all—and I seriously doubt that she could have—would have saved its blast of cold for closure. Lessley, to her great credit, however, is apparently not worried about putting wham-bang stuff up front. There’s no toe-in-the-water hesitance, no wading into context or meaning or impact. She does not work up to her poem; the poem starts. Period. The body of the poem is startling as well, but never so staggering as that first sentence, and closure wisely enhances that synoptic, opening image rather than trying to supplant it. “. . . Ice splits, / ” the speaker says, “in the distance. What breaks will break. Let it.” Even her resignation, it appears, has an edge; the what-she-says is sharp, but the how-she-says-it is the clincher: plosives, period; velars, period; and the shortest sentence of the poem, gliding on its l to its abrupt, plosive rest, “Let it,” and the resigned, untensioned fall of that final syllable. The poem, and I will be so bold, intentional fallacy be damned, as to assume the poet as well, is self-assured enough to understand that more great stuff will come, she needn’t be stingy with what she has now; and that closing annotation is superb. She didn’t try to outdo herself; she deepened what already worked insanely well.
The second section of the book begins with the title poem, “Two-Headed Nightingale,” which is not about a bird, monstrous, mutant, or otherwise, but about a pair of conjoined twins, born into slavery and sold while they were still young to a showman—hence the song and dance team billed as the “Two-Headed Nightingale.” With the biographical notation beneath the title, “Christine & Millie McCoy, 1851–1912,” what we get, before we get to the body of the poem at all, is the vision of the conjoined body of the two women. Lessley is smart enough to know she doesn’t have to explain; the juxtaposition of title and notation is sufficient for the reader to fill in what’s needed to set up and see the poem.
The poem’s format, which at first glance seems open-field, underscores the twins’ joining without being a cutesy, visual representation of conjoined twins. Its design produces an enactment of complication and contrast, certainly a deeper truth than might have otherwise been enjoyed with a more literal visual effect. I believe—and it remains speculation—that at this point in the book Lessley’s earlier work begins. The form feels tentative, like the experiment—successful though it may be—of a younger writer; the subject matter prompted by curiosity and empathy, perhaps, rather than investment. It is a lovely poem with a closure that seems to foreshadow Lessley’s later knack for the unforgiving edge. It’s the perfect title poem for a first book that feels both young and old at once.
The younger self is most dominant in the dance and dancer poems; the young girl’s dream and difficulty—a topical arena that seems to emanate from a more girlish place than the surgical precision of the poems of wider scope in the first section. The control in these dance pieces is still good; my disappointment with them—and it is my disappointment, not a failure of the poems themselves—is the material. It’s girly; I’m not. And because I have already experienced what Lessley is capable of, I become impatient. I find, too, the breadth of realization, or at least the inclusivity of resonance, is narrower. Young girls, even young female writers, are more often enchanted with self than with the larger world.
This section includes the only prose poem and the only failure I see in the book. And I include this not to be unkind but because in the context of what appears to be the book’s arc, it’s fascinating.
“Finale: Curtain Call,” begins with a prose block (of unrelenting repetitive performance preparation, pain of varying degrees). Its fragmented, list-like quality appears to be a diary, or pseudo-diary, of the experience.
bone spur. ice. class. audition. height: training: weight:
103. cast. rehearsal. sweat. bone spur. master. shave.
bone spur. hunger. pianist. Pas de Quatre. bone spur.
The block goes on for another fifteen lines and then the text comes unglued in a sort of scattered-on-the-page final movement—a clever enactment of nerves at the point of performance and the curtain’s fall. The final word appears alone on its line: “applause” with no period. Applause? Well, yeah, applause! Of course applause! Good grief. But as the payoff for all that listmaking? One more literal chronological notation? Yes, I get it: suffering for art and the love of applause. The enactment of the tedium and pain. But that’s it? No accretion of meaning, no subtext? Nothing that might be news for the reader? Just that flat, literal line of occurrence? For me, that’s the deadest giveaway that the poem was written by an immature poet. The poem never gets bigger than the poet. The girl in the poem got what she worked for, end of poem.
If we write at all, we’ve written an equivalent of “Finale: Curtain Call” and probably many more than just one. And that’s ok. It’s a poem we probably need to write in order to get to, assuming we ever do, something as I-bar strong and sleek as “Fallen Starling.” In fact, juxtapose the poems “Finale: Curtain Call” and “Fallen Starling” and you can see the corollary effect of the way the title poem’s title (“Two-Headed Nightingale”) is juxtaposed to the notation (“Christine & Millie McCoy, 1851-1912”): It’s all one needs—those two pieces—to infer a larger story. The larger story in the space between the two poems is bigger than a poem in context: It appears to be the history of a poet’s beginning. But in “Finale . . .” itself, there is no larger story. It means only what it says. That’s the tragedy of the bad, or very young, poem. The poem stays the size of a young girl’s gratification.
The greatest number of poetic variations occur in the third section—and there are poems there that make me swear Lessley can do just about anything, poems as fabulous, I think, as “Fallen Starling,” but entirely different in nature, in voice, in execution. Lessley’s ability to cast the unforgettable image, however, is strong and carries over. Here are two opening snippets: “In the long night called girlhood the heart holds / tight in its bony crate. Like a bird of fire caged.”; “My inheritance is a thumbnail’s splinter; / a pocked lined with grease. I come // from a frayed line, DNA’s loose / stitch—on my mother’s side . . . .” The first is from “Metronome,” a beautiful lyric; the second from “Genealogical Survey across Several Counties,” a personal narrative, a two-pager so strong—and so utterly different from almost everything else—I had to stop and reread the opening section of the book again to convince myself that these poems were actually in the same book. It’s remarkable, such quality coupled with such variety, and remarkable, frankly, seems an understatement.
The fourth section does its work by shuffling topical opportunities and formats, pulling from the themata of the book, poetic and personal: a museum poem, a narrative piece about an aerialist, a devastatingly angry and effective apostrophe to a dead father, a couple of myth-reliant pieces, the obligatory “After Reading (insert someone)” poem, a fabulous, furious, anaphoric poem incorporating the blistering father theme, from which I will quote only the beginning and the end. The opening:
If seconds is what it takes to excavate the reared tarantula
If John Wayne is nowhere in sight
If the female spider is solitary, velveteen, loathsome
If female is always a killer
and the last:
If the fallen man weren’t my father,
what above remains fact?
If half, if a fourth, if a fraction
If truth’s better third is invention
If ever daughter’s a verb
It’s a far, far cry from “Finale: Curtain Call.” And without conjuring Kipling, she’s turned him inside out, flayed him, and hung him out for others to view the way a rancher might shoot and then hang the carcass of a dead coyote on a barbed-wire fence as a message to other sheep-killing coyotes. It’s brilliant and bitter and I love it.
The fifth section, and the book’s closure, is made up of a single poem, “Self-Portrait as (Super/Sub) Pacific,” written in twenty-one three-tercet sections. “. . . A great fog,” she says,
pushes back the Pacific’s
restless hills. And the past rises
again before me. As Inavigate its pitched surface
daughter lover sister other
no myth I was holds true.
It’s a key to the door of wiggle-room that also eases the pressure of many of my questions and eases me out of the book as well.
I’ve been chasing Shara Lessley page by page throughout this book and every time I thought I was about to catch her, she changed. And she’s so skilled at her changes that it’s not until long after my initial readings did I understand that she’s Proteus, each of her conformations utterly convincing. No myth I was holds true, she says at the tail end of the book—so I’m betting she knew all along the maze she was threading me through. A flawed book? Yes, sure. But fabulously flawed in a wonderful, telling way.
Two-Headed Nightingale is dark and irregular and filled with light. All of those. And I look forward to reading anything Shara Lessley writes, though I’ll try to hold back any expectations. I’m anxious to see how her enormous talent will manifest itself next and what shape the proffered hand will take when I go on to navigate the pitched surfaces of her vast poetic forest.
Endnotes
1. I am not saying that Lessley intended this effect, though she certainly may have. I’m saying that the effect of her having done this is such.
2. “. . . [I]t is sense impressions that make writing vivid, and there is a physiological reason for this. Information taken in through the five senses is processed in the limbic system of the brain, which generates sensuous responses in the body: heart rate, blood/oxygen flow, muscle reaction, and so forth. Emotional response consists of these physiological reactions and so in order to have an effect on your reader’s emotions, you must literally get into the limbic system, which you can do only through the senses.” Janet Burroway, Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, 3rd ed., Penguin Academics.
3. I pirate and alter a bit from my short-lived online column on craft. “Some Notes on Making Poems: Material and Matter,” a Tiferet online column available only to subscribers.