Book Review: INTERSTATE by Chard deNiord
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Interstate Poems by Chard deNiord |
| Pitt Poetry Press, 2015 $15.95 |
The word interstate can be defined as involving, existing between, or connecting two or more separate states. Often this links to the physical—a road we travel in our beat-up 87 Volkswagen, windows down, crossing state boarders in summer skin. But in Chard deNiord’s newest poetry collection, Interstate, I find myself at the intersection of the metaphysical, crossing not spaces on a map, but the wanderings and wonderings of the mind: “If I look at the stars and see anything but stars— / pinpricks, diamonds—then so be it. / I have another eye that sees the rebus in things.”
Yet, to say this collection involves a speaker solely located in the mind would be to neglect one of the main threads carried throughout these poems. The natural world is as present as our hands on the wheel, turning with every poem. Interstate is divided into four sections, with poems titled “In the Grass,” “Confession of a Bird Watcher,” “Under the Sun,” and “Head of the Meadow.” deNiord uses nature as a way for his speaker to access emotion. The reoccurring image of a window, for example, is a symbol of this processing. In “Confession of a Bird Watcher,” the speaker admits how, for years, he has watched birds fly into the window and break their necks, and continues to because, “how else to live among them and keep my view.” While this addresses the literal action of the poem, the speaker then shifts to a metaphorical thought, ending the poem here: “With a heart that rejects its reasons in favor of keeping what it wants: / the sight of you, the sight of you.”
The true emotions, brought to light through the natural world are often feelings of fear, loss, and pain. Multiple poems are dedicated or in conversation with a woman named Ruth, who died in 2011. The fourth section specifically brings these themes to a head. The poems are brief and compact, as if the speaker has lost words, or at least the desire to communicate. One of my favorites in this section is titled “At the River View Café.” Though nature is still at play, the language is more direct. The complexity found in deNiord’s writing is ever-present: both light and dark simultaneously exist, the metaphysical matched with reality:
The wind blew all summer after you died.
A friend asked what I was feeling now
that you were gone. I said, ‘A great emptiness
and fullness at the same time….’
I sat at my table above the river and listened
to the wind flap the umbrellas like a tattered name.
Although the collection addresses heavy, often-painful topics, deNiord doesn’t overstate or override his collection with such. It’s not until the fourth section, really, that we thrust open the window and sit amid the pain. This feels realistic, our minds and words cloaking our ability to process until the pain we’ve imagined has happened. Then, and only then, are we struck with how we must deal in the face of the whole, beautiful world.