Julie Carr
Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
Coffeehouse Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56689-251-3
6x9, 74pps
$16
Reviewed by Megan Burns
A Doubled Woman: Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
This slim volume is a meditation on birth, death, grief, and nature in a series of poems designated by Carr as fragments, lines, and abstracts. The poems echo one another in images of birds, shores, rain, leaves, salt, and honey. The subject matter of the mother, the daughter, conception, and death are also woven into the tapestry, but it is the language, the sounds themselves, that interconnect and create a whole in a book that speaks about what is in pieces. The loss of the mother, a double loss due to the mother’s Alzheimer’s, is complicated by the speaker’s pregnancy. Images of birth and death as well as daughters and mothers become blurred and confused in the poems as the voice attempts to tease out with language an order built upon internal sounds. Sounds become a mainstay, propelling an investigation into complicated gestures.
The book begins with a poem titled “Landlocked Lines,” an important departure as the poems that follow seem to flow further from the shore and into the abyss. “It would be absurd to imagine the absent person in the margins of the book” this poem tells us, and here we begin to confront the idea of elegy and how this form shapes the person who is lost. This first poem introduces ideas or images that resurface, much like memories of a lost loved one; a physical object like the “red wall,” birds, and stories about giving birth to save a life all return in later poems. Alliteration and internal rhymes ground most of these poems; they escalate to a frenzy especially when grief seems to overpower the speaker:
now rectangles of fluorescent, of bold blonde daylight on walls of old dreck now shine like gestalt or defense, like splayed hair. Now old odes or seeds of thought turned snug in gummy mugs: I’m alone here in a day like an arrow or a lance in a gash. Day, don’t say things, don’t order (12).
