Flesh​ by Sonia Di Placido

The Missing Field​ by Jennifer Zilm

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

Guernica Editions, 2018

Guernica Editions, 2018

Sonia Di Placido’s Flesh and Jennifer Zilm’s The Missing Field, numbers 254 and 255 respectively in Guernica Editions’ long-running Essential Poets series, are very different books in style, in tone, and in much of their subject matter. They may differ, and differ substantially, but they have enough in common that it seems fitting that one should follow the other in this series. They are both preoccupied with quotidian details, with accumulation and lists, grounding their allusive intellectual flights firmly in the materiality of lived reality, and they both work regularly and to great effect with juxtaposition.     
 
Di Placido’s Flesh pulses with poems that are as full-bodied and fleshy as the title, with its dripping letters, and the brightly-coloured cover promise. The third section, “Field Notes from a Taxidermist’s Daughter,” most obviously delivers on the promise of the title. The first poem in this section, “What is Animal Memorabilia,” begins: 

I remember ducks in the dryer
I remember wet birds sometimes guts in pails
Or Glad garbage bags. 

And “What is Taxidermy?” contains clinical explanations whose flat language only serves to highlight the essential goriness of the practice:

Not including Killing, Cutting, Gutting, Skinning, remove
any natural skin habitat: hair eyes or such features from
the “specimens” and place each flesh figure over an artificial
standing body made of wood chucks or shavings. 

But the book’s preoccupation with bodies and their constituent parts is by no means limited to this section. The following section, “Recipes,” is similarly visceral. “Moose Meat & Puréed Tomato Stew” contains the following lines:

Refrigerated into milky redness overnight
cold        raw        organic organs
mixed from meat                             tenderized
[…]
requires chewing with precision
Like precious stones gone soft
the tissue folds, stouter than beef
 
Succulent with sauce, the plush life
melts in the mouth

The phrase “the plush life” is one of my favourites from the book and exemplifies one of the collection’s greatest strengths: the way Di Placido can suddenly twist away from calculated description into resonant lyricism, setting restrained precision side-by-side with linguistic exuberance.
 
And this is the other way in which this is a fleshy book: Di Placido’s poems are rich with sound. “Canto for a Cameo Trail blazer” begins:

In a quest for the quiet, low-carved ivory bond,
(a ring) carrying a cameo of colonial
Penitence among a consecrated catholic earth

The lines thread “ls” through the hard C’s of “carved,” “carrying,” etc. At times, the rhythms of the poems take on an incantatory quality. Take for example “La Luna at Letter 12”:

Liberty has me longing
 
Low has me lingering
 
Loud has me lapsing
 
Liquid has me in libation
 
Lush has me in lustre
 
Loss has me out of lift

Or, from much earlier in the book, “Cervidae”:

What you eat is what we eat is
what you eat is what we eat with you.
 
What you chew is what we chew is
what you chew is what we chew with you.
 
What you swallow is what we swallow is
what you swallow is what we swallow with you.

​The book’s closing poem, “Fleshing,” beautifully draws together the bodily content and embodied sounds:

“and not transcend this movement” “and keep sense”
“or smooth with the body” “of body,” “bodily dance,
not dance” “body grace.” “body flutter,” “out of the body”
“in” “inside” “side” “of body” “to the body”
“forensic” “or flourish” “fleshing”

Whatever their contents, whether they are about taxidermy or cooking, after Sylvia Plath or in the manner of Alice Notley’s The Descent of Allette, Di Placido’s poems ask to be read aloud, to be felt in the mouth as much as seen on the page.
 
Flesh is as learned as it is sensual, referencing Petrarch, ancient Greek, Hildegard von Bingen, Isaiah, and Hindu and Sanskrit as filtered through Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical movement. And this impressive range is one of the features it shares with Zilm’s The Missing Field.
 
The Missing Field is divided into three sections: “ephemera,” the titular “The missing field,” and “In the archives.” “ephemera” starts with a definition from the International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Sciences: “Ephemera has been described as the ‘minor transient documents of everyday life,’” and the poems in this section match this description. They are minor, focused on quotidian details, and finely observed in a way that is very much in keeping with the section’s title’s lack of capitalization.  “Two Postcards from a Redhead in the Desert” juxtaposes a pair of numbered sections. In the first, “rainbow over Masada,” Zilm describes the experience of hiking in the desert. She begins:

Now I see how the sand is manuscript: the desert unfurling
Upwards and all around us—a scroll. My sun-punctuated
                body
calligraphy scaling the snake path

​And she ends, after an excursion into Hebrew etymology, with the fact of body under the sun:

                And the desert is speaking
my ginger skin bright, bright red. Buzzards circling my
                dizzying
head: my dense, dense freckles.

​The second part of the poem, “Khirbet Qumram: The Scriptorium & Mikvaot,” follows a similar pattern, beginning with the Hebrew word for “red” and a cafeteria cook’s observation that the speaker is redhaired, dipping into more Hebrew etymology, and closing with the following: 

                                I imagine my body,
sun punctuated, walking the steps into one of these cisterns,
the hot damp swallowing bare skin, a desert Ophelia, a surfacing
rush of red hair.

This yoking of quotidian detail and erudition typifies the poems in the collection. In “Reading Rilke in the Bath, Revisited,” Zilm draws together Rilke’s poetry, Indian mangoes, and the capitalization of nouns in German, including the lines “I swallow chewing gum / because I love the throat’s toke resistance.” This makes for poems that are at once headily intellectual and firmly grounded in the minutiae of lived experience.
 
The poems often work through surprising and unexpected juxtapositions, linking distant places, separate events, and disparate ideas. “Deftly the Hands of Hairdresser”’s first section is set in a hair salon in Lime Ridge Mall. Its second section leaps to Tang Shan City in China and references the Epic of Gilgamesh. The third section returns to the mall where the speaker is captured “between two mirrors.” And this image, of the speaker sitting between two mirrors, reflected back at herself over and over again, neatly captures the effect of Zilm’s use of juxtaposition—it creates long series of recursive gradations of meaning as the reader oscillates between sections, across poems. 
 
This is also a lyrical book that is as attuned to the sounds of words as it is to their origins and content. Take, for instance, this stanza from “The Reference Interview”:

last summer it was concrete-city-fire-hydrant-
in-a-tenement hot and I never saw you
because we were both working downtown
as death receptionists in different hotels
on opposing days of the week and I kept confusing
the words heat and filth and Sunday and Monday. 

What I like most about these lines is the way the hyphens speed you up, and then, when you think you are about to begin to slow down in the second line, the paratactic structure of the sentences keeps pulling you along until you reach the four measured, steady, almost solemn beats of the final line. Or, take the beginning of “#16 Hastings”:

When Downtown is beginning
to raise its lazy grace
from the curve of Cordova and Carrall,
the bottle depot is closed for business.

The alliteration of the middle lines is bracketed by the alliteration of the first and fourth lines, creating a complex, tidy sonic unit.
 
The book is also firmly grounded in the city of Vancouver, although the poem’s relationships to the city shift across the collection.  The first section is filled with transit poems, most notably “#16 Hastings” and “The Girl on the Bus,” but “Valentine: Our Lady of Perpetual Help” also begins with a section titled “#4 Westbound: University.”  In these poems, the speaker is most often moving through the city observing it from a distance that is not safe, not entirely at a remove, but still a separation. In the third section of the book, the poems are more set in place. The speaker in “The Reference Interview” is working downtown. “A text message sent from Companion Books” closes

                I will bear it
back to my 450 square feet. You should come over
and borrow all 62 pages—if you want to—anytime.

And, when a bus does appear, it does so after it stops.
 
You may have noticed that I began my discussion of Zilm’s book by listing its three sections, but I have only so far talked about two. That is because the middle section, “The missing field,” is, as the name would suggest, missing. It is included in the table of contents, but not in the book itself. There are no poems, not even a title page, only a noticeable absence. This is an audacious choice, and one that makes the book because “The missing field” is the best kind of absence—a structuring that resonates with significance and ramifies the meaning of the poems around it, and an absence whose effects I will continue to think about for quite some time.
 
Zilm’s and Di Placido’s collections may be quite different, but they make a fitting pair, and they are both, for different reasons and in different ways, deserving of your attention. 

---

Aaron Schneider teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he also runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series. His stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, filling station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Maple Tree Literary Supplement.  His first book, Grass-Fed, is coming soon from Quattro Books. Visit his website here.