Captivity

January 22, 2007
The squat, long-lined poems of Sheck's fifth collection meditate on American captivity narratives—stories popular in the late 17th century, such as Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
, often about abduction by Native Americans—as metaphors for the limitations of consciousness and the poetry that tries to render it. These narratives are directly addressed in the 17 "Removes," a term taken from Rowlandson's book. Elsewhere, Sheck (Black Series
) references other singularly American figures, including Dickinson, Stevens, William James and Emerson. Sheck relishes the "slow conversion of myself into nothingness," a necessary (and often violent) step toward understanding "this chain of feelings by which we mean (if it is that) a self." These poems at times seem to court vagueness—words such as "scatter," "broken," and "elsewhere" are among Sheck's most precise descriptive terms. Some readers may find that Sheck exhausts her themes and the time from which they originate; modernity appears infrequently, and when it does—in the form of "a computer screen candescing," the human genome and one "marketing director"—the effect is jarring. Throughout, however, Sheck's long lines sustain an elegant uncertainty, and her fractured syntax calls both Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins to mind: "The seconds slant and coarse with split-asunder."

March 1, 2007
This petite volume of 71 poems physically resembles a psalm book or a journal. And yet, because the poet is Scheck ("Black Series", among other collections), the reader should expect neither comfort nor context. Scheck's high-modern aesthetic attempts to isolate whorls of thought from the world's backdrop. Each brief poem is an isolated gesture, a voice asserting itself against the white page as if to say, I am what is not. "The Thirteenth Remove" (the lovely noun "remove" is borrowed from a colonial captivity narrative) gets to the psychological point: "You who paint, if you painted us, we are the spots on the canvas left uncovered." From poem to poem, there are traces of a worlda hospital, a windowed landscapebut no explanations beyond the occasional jarring detail: "today the fasting girl died." Motifs of death and illness alternate with a charged diction that the poet attributes to her "interactions with Gerard Manley Hopkins' journals." The topic is consciousness as it wavers between captivity and liberty, from "this white unswaying place" to "this green, this blueness," where the speaker finds that "sometimes what you look at hard seems to look hard at you." For sophisticated readers.Ellen M. Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2007
Sheck follows " Black Series" (2001) with another bewitching collection. Extended lines evoke "long fields" open to the sky and interpretation as Sheck aligns landscapes with mindscapes. "Genome" makes this mirroring explicit as Sheck illuminates the hidden topography of the body, "vast stretches of empty surfaces, then clusters of information teeming." With the genetic code as a template, she creates a poetic code out of weighted words (" breakage, quiet, scar, vanishing, strangeness, cold, astray, sunder"). By performing "interactions" with the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, she forges arresting juxtapositions to express spiritual longing and her perception of "the quiet uproar of undone." Sheck responds to American captivity narratives in a series of exquisite and haunting poems she calls "Removes," tracking a captive's journey across a somber land and through a wilderness of feelings. As we travel through Sheck's highly charged universe, she reminds us that we are all captives, of our bodies, senses, desires, society, and even "the fierce machinery of thinking." Yet we are free to reimagine ourselves as we walk the earth and gather up its beauty, and as we explore the mind's candescent treasures.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)