We start asleep, her “book open,” and then the expanse of the empty page. Claire Marie Stancek’s wyrd] bird, published by Omnidawn (2020), moves by entries, thoughts, and visions journaled, a commonplace. But the collection isn’t disconnected ephemera. The poet evokes her influences and terms, like Hildegard von Bingen, whose piece The Zeal or Jealousy of God corresponds to the book’s own idiosyncratic wandering mysticism. Think green: “O green vigor of the sweet apple.” Or: “O green vigor within me.” Green is that familiar ecological trope, but Stancek designs a compendium of its strangeness, how it “moves liquidly from noun to adjective to adverb to verb.” In addition to the mystical, she’s tempted by the theoretical, quoting Bruce R. Smith: “‘Green’ upsets syntax because it upsets any easy relationship between subject and object.’”
These aren’t airy excursions. Hildegard’s shifting definition adds heft to language and atomizes its peculiar origins because words “could be of sound, or of flame, or of vapor, of mud or limb or stone.” Corporeality, like “the limb,” especially compels Stancek, her “green Thought[s]” drifting from a stray memory of someone bicycling “by, no hands, in loose relaxed posture” to the “two dead sparrows on the ledge outside the library window,” a gray picture included as if to verify. She can’t hold the birds. The picture can’t hold the experience. What green vigor?
The collection spirals with tropes like wings, color, and the Garden of Eden, but the organization resists the centripetal force of any image. Wyrd traces its lineage back to the Anglo-Saxon idea of fate, but also to older words about becoming and twisting, so this book calls upon and then complicates teleology. “Sometimes,” Stancek writes, “the visionary epiphany is a simple one: wind.” One word emphasizes vision; the other denotes the unseen. From the esoteric, which isn’t simplistic, she moves toward explication and recounts her personal history with the concept of Satan, locating the original meaning of that word (“adversary”), unafraid to mix all these modes of inquiry as “Hildegard mixes metaphors.” The transference of metaphor “call[s] forth a simultaneity of sensation, intoxicating.” The collection is essaystic without amounting to essays, so the brief explications sometimes slip into the opaque: “between boom she and they which turning make.” The syntax contorts with the various registers of voice, which isn’t a problem the book wants to solve but dwell in.
“What would it mean,” Stancek wonders, “to write an utterly embodied book?” The refrains connote holding and the impossibility of that. Utterly. To the absolute degree, according to the etymology. The poet admires contradiction. Citing Richard Cullen Rath’s explanation of European church design, Stancek is fascinated by the “priest’s voice, directed away from the congregation,” how it “would reach listeners first as echo.” The chancel, seemingly a symbol of separation, becomes a “very large musical instrument, somewhat like the body of a lute.” The book cannot be embodied, but there nevertheless is a voice, a resonance, the author unseen but heard through our own familiar cadence, if we’re reading aloud. Our voice is something like her echo. Stancek includes enough authors to trouble the designation of authorship itself, to be drawn to the choral.
But what does it all mean and matter? Is this book just the beautiful “wyrd in the trees?” If so, good. It is “grammatically all,” the mysticism not cloistered but social, with the book’s ending gesturing toward a rereading of Milton’s Eve touching “everything with a longing that touches everything,” only to “unmak[e] it all again.” We hear the voices of cops, too, the sound of threat, and as this line recalls the earlier section on the chancel, we realize the limits of that trope. The poet is witness, documentarian, participant, mystic, woman and more, but also caught like a “wire in the trees.” The trap becomes spacious, however, because the “wyrd” maybe isn’t a singular fate. It’s a “web.”
You can purchase this collection here. I hope you enjoy.