“Voices of the Fragments”
A review of
??Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems
by Anne Doe Overstreet.
Review by Brad Fruhauff.
Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems
Anne Doe Overstreet.
Paperback: T.S. Poetry Press, 2011.
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Every fragment . . . articulates the language of the entire.
In Delicate Machinery Suspended, Overstreet speaks in three main voices: an intellectual, a lyric, and a playful voice. Since the lyric dominates, and since I tended to be drawn more to the intellectual and playful, I was at first concerned that what I liked about the volume was something marginal to the project as a whole. But I think it is more apt to say that each voice plays a role in shoring up the fragments of reality into something that, if not itself “entire,” speaks “the language of the entire.”
To be clear, Overstreet’s lyric voice has its power. I was halfway through Delicate Machinery when I realized that we had published Overstreet four years ago in Relief, and when I looked her up, I found I had already dog-eared those same poems (“Annunciation: Triptych” and “In This Place of Grass,” revised as “As a Flower of the Field”) in this new volume. Either they impressed me for similar reasons as back then, or they made an impression on me that drew me back to them unconsciously—either way, they are good poems.
In her lyric voice, Overstreet frequently creates what I think of as the “lyric mood.” This is that increasing pervasive quality of lyric, especially by Christians, wherein the poem seeks to invoke the numinous through a careful collage of impressions that somehow add up to more than the sum of their parts.
At her best, in poems like “Domestic,” Overstreet achieves this by turning us from the grand and sublime natural scenes that normally inspire transcendent emotion and inviting us to “treat with kindness the hound at your foot, / with reverence spill salt onto the plate,” insisting that in this attention, which is the “least you can do,” we will find the mundane “becoming something more.”
Poems like “Preparing for Market,” however, do not quite get there for me. Overstreet tries to carry us from the act of herding cattle for eventual slaughter to some moment of awe in which “The dark / draws down to cover our tracks, to divide us / from what we have just done.” But it is not clear what we have “just done.” Here it is possible Overstreet relies a little too much on the lyric convention of leaving off, trying to ramp the reader up to an emotion that has not been fully prepared.
In her intellectual voice we most clearly see Overstreet seeking poetic figures, lines of connection between one kind of thing and another, between the mountains so far from her house and the place where she feels at home, or between her interest in observatories and stars and her desire to feel a vast presence. Like many a fine poet before her, Overstreet is obsessed with figuration. She wants to know how a part, an aspect, a glimpse, etc., can come to stand in for a transcendent whole, can “articulate the language of the entire.”
I call this an intellectual search in part because I think that she believes it more than she achieves it. In one poem, she makes a delightfully grotesque analogy between poetry and her old summer job transporting body parts from a hospital to a lab. I may not quite follow her to the sense of the whole she is looking for, but I do appreciate the course she maps out.
A handful of poems belong to her playful voice. Her “Resolutions” are just thoughtful and mysterious enough to avoid preciousness:
date a baker and learn to taste the difference in flours
[ . . . ]
ask to be called Jane collect Janes
[ . . . ]
study walls, what they keep in
In “The Very Air That Midas Takes In Gleams,” she gives the Midas tale a surprising twist, imagining the tragedy is not that he turns what he loves to cold, dead metal but that he cannot access what is of real value. In other poems, she plays with the Icarus myth and Little Red Riding Hood.
Readers of ERB will appreciate the poems about food, farmers’ markets, raising livestock, and fishing. Overstreet, not unlike Brother Lawrence, looks for the wonderful in the ordinary, seeks contentment in the boundaries of her life. “Surviving the Open Heart,” a poem reflecting on her father’s heart surgery, may best express her fine appreciation for life as usual. Reflecting on the surgery, she is:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .troubled
by the unthinkable cut, the parting of red wall
upon blue, the delicate machinery suspended.
When life is so improbable as this, we might understand when the poet finds a single voice inadequate to it. If the lyric voice is sometimes in danger of casting a Midas’s cold gilding over her subject, her intellectual and playful sides break up the rhythm and keep her book as a whole in the gray uncertainty of our common lives.
———-
Brad Fruhauff is Editor-in-Chief of Relief: A Christian Literary Expression and Assistant Professor of English at Trinity International University.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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