Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

SaltWater by Lane Ashfeldt

2015; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2015.0266

1945-8134

Janet Mary Livesey,

Irish and British Studies

Lane Ashfeldt. SaltWater. Dublin. Liberties Press. 2014. isbn 9781909718340 I love the ocean. I love the sea. I love the sounds, smells, and sights that abound when one sits on the beach looking out to sea. For a landlubber who has never been able to live close to the water but who adores the experience whenever it is presented, the short stories in SaltWater touched more than one nerve. This collection of delightful tales is divided into three sections, the titles telling tales of their own before the reader even opens to the first page: Roaring Water, Slack Water, and Rising Sea Level suggest, quite aptly, the tone of each section. Roaring Water’s three short stories and one nine-line anecdote speak to the raging, unstoppable measure of Mother Nature in her liquid form. These tales are not happy ones, but neither are they sad. They are poignant and, oh, so true. Death is just one element of life, but occasionally it arrives too early, carried in by the waters of all the seas of the world. Slack Water depicts the life changes brought about via proximity to remembrances of the sea. Can, or should, a character leave everything behind in London to move back to the coastal village of his birth and begin a different lifestyle? Can a character lose the enchantment of a love affair in Greece after returning to Ireland with her Greek lover and seeing how he does not really suit her? And what does a transparent -sided crib in a hospital delivery ward have to do with the transparency of the sea? The answers are in this section’s stories. The third section, Rising Sea Level, is a reference to people moving through life and their relationships centered round the sea. These could be “ordinary, everyday kinds of tales,” but the mysterious, suspenseful ambience keeps the reader on edge, expecting something without knowing what. There is an air of steady, growing tension, and the reader feels a need to read fast in order to discover the ending, commiserate with the characters, or even, possibly, join in the happiness of a joyful culmination. Second Childhood Fanny Howe Graywolf Press, 2014 How much of a poet’s biography can be read into (or behind) a book of poems? In the case of Fanny Howe’s latest collection, Second Childhood, the temptation to project a life onto the page is irresistible, but the author herself cautions against such a reading. In a recent interview, Howe admitted: “The ‘I’ in my poems is a stranger to me, someone ‘sent forth’ like a character in a novel to explore the bizarre nature of being, to touch and feel surfaces, to wander as a child does, invisible, without power” (nationalbook .org). Nevertheless, human empathy tantalizes us to unearth the archaeological self beneath the lyric “I” in poetry, and Howe’s poems invite readers to imagine the author as a child wandering through her work. As Howe’s own “strangeness” to herself suggests, prior to the disconnect between poet and persona is the disconnect between the various selves that make up a life, despite the seeming coherence implied by the single name on a book’s title page. “You’re like someone crossing a border daily,” Howe writes, “a person who is to itself unknown” (“Between Delays”). Under the rubric of a title like Second Childhood, the reader might wonder what sort of return such a rebirth or rejuvenation entails, especially when the repeated impulse is to “stop becoming an adult,” to shed the weight of “luggage from the twentieth century.” Yet for the speakers in Howe’s poems, the apparent chasm between childhood and adulthood implies that those gardens of innocence will never be fully recaptured: “I’ve lost my child at the bend where we parted. / We will never come back to that hour” (“The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams”). One recourse to the straitjacket of mortality is belief in the metaphysical, and several of Howe’s poems imagine “postulants” or “penitents” who might gain access to arcs of transcendence. In A God in the House: Poets Talk about Faith (2012), Howe speaks candidly to Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine...