Sycamore

February 20, 2017
This fifth collection from Fagan (Lip) burns like ice, with a seemingly cool crystalline surfaces nonetheless hot to the touch. Such heat derives from lost love; a study of obsession and cessation, the book reels in the aftermath of a breakup, recording a winter of “days like an unused billboard.” “If I look pale,/ come closer: my light is/ inside where she left it,” Fagan writes in one of several poems looking back on the relationship’s waning days. The past is not her only focus; the book also looks outward, to her snowbound present tense, for inspiration. Indeed, the eponymous tree figures prominently as an embodiment of her grief, for her “blues gone brown and lichen-scaled.” Such pain has done little to dull her wit or vision: “maybe more than last words/ word games reveal a lot,” she writes in “Kaboom Pantoum,” a shining example of the book’s formal confidence. If her riffing and language play, her “blizzard in the brain,” can occasionally feel busy or dutiful, the book’s “dark patches/ and bright spots” easily make up for it. Fagan’s flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve, and make an excellent companion for meteorological or existential cold snaps: “my leaves fell./ And it took a good while, but I grew new/ ones. Then the birds came back.”

April 15, 2017

Whether she is detailing an abandoned sledding hill ("the days like an unused billboard"), a sycamore tree ("I barely creak/ in wind that raised and hung me/ out to dry"), or a missed meteor ("a gold star shook/ lose from blue firmament"), National Poetry Series winner Fagan (The Raft) is a tremendous scene setter. And the scenes she sets often effectively disclose tamped-down sorrow at the end of a relationship. Not surprisingly, then, hers is a landscape of snow and ice ("a detonation--/ then white everywhere"), yet we frequently meet, as if striding, her noble sycamores, attentively and variably rendered and even given speech: "When I was dead, one of the whiter/ sycamores who live on the river said, / Kathy, why didn't you live in your body more?" VERDICT A quiet, beautifully articulated work whose mood does not wear.

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