Poems by Sharon White, reviewed by Sara Verstynen
THE BODY IS BURDEN AND DELIGHT, (Cornerstone Press)
Sharon White’s The Body Is Burden and Delight was the perfect selection for The 2023 Portage Poetry Series, awarded annually by Cornerstone Press. The prize description reminds us, “a portage is a pathway, and to portage is to trek across that pathway to get from one place to another.” With this in mind, the word becomes a serendipitous map and bridge—of history, geography, and the self. The Body Is Burden and Delight (White’s third poetry collection) is a many-layered work that traverses countries, migration, the shape of water, and the lives of women, directing the reader through the immediate landscape and into a wider view of impermanence and the progression of time.
The collection is structured in three movements—Spring, Simmer Dim, and Owl-Light—sections whose titles may activate one’s learned understanding of seasons and the qualities of light and water, gesturing toward an expectation of the poems to come. While I found this true for me, White also offers juxtapositions of images and unique syntactical choices that, like water as well as migration, can move a reader toward the unexpected. “Surprised by farms,” White begins in the book’s opening poem, “piles of birchwood and pine on the bus north / black rivers cut woods swollen with snowmelt and rain, the sticky / leaves of birches, a boy holding a bag of cookies.” From the start, the poem suggests surprise is found in the ordinary, in farms and a rural backdrop. However, it also establishes a rule that in order to discover the surprise, one must pay careful attention. It is this close attention that allows us to hear the nuance and evolution of the “Roar of snowmelt in all the streams & rivers & rivulets & trickles / —bathed in sunlight / echoes / the twitter/chatter of birds—(and now a truck) / (& now a carpenter bee).” In fact, the layers and details of the landscape are ever-shifting, drawing the eye from element to element, creating an effect that is cumulative and rich with resonance.
The poems in this collection move across geographies and natural landscapes, including Riklundgarden and Kultsjon, in Sweden; Llanfrothen and St. Ninian’s Isles in the United Kingdom, and Vilnius in Lithuania. Although these locations are not necessarily well-known or universally celebrated, specific knowledge is not required to appreciate the work. As the reader inhabits these places through the poems, reading their names and the stories that belong to them, we have the opportunity to understand the layered significance of the geography. What’s more, despite the great distances traveled across poems, there is an inherent connection between each of them, or perhaps it is due to the deeper considerations about which White writes, that feels unforced, and in their woven elements—universally connected. In the poem “Imitating Celestial Things,” White writes, “several writers tell me people / in Japan can see only what they want to see in the landscape.” Perhaps this is true of people or readers anywhere.
One of the most notable qualities of White’s collection is its generosity of form. It allows for poetic structure as well as more hybrid forms. This makes sense, given the fluid quality of the work and its subject matter. Here, the poet allows the work to take the shape that best honors its intention. This is smart and effective, considering the landscapes traveled, the lives visited, and the spectral presences weaved quietly throughout. For example, in “The Forest Near Paneriai,” a piece in six parts, White begins each of the first five sections with the phrase, “Vilnius was the last place she wanted to be.” But with each declaration of this fact at the start of each consecutive movement, the work evolves and reminds us of the benefit of having patience to let experiences and illumination unfold. Sometimes, great discovery comes slowly. The speaker is resistant to the place—“She distrusted its beautiful streets winding past courtyards full of cars and cats and huddled ghosts.” Yet, as she remains in the place, there is an inherited memory and new appreciation that settles in, of her mother’s life there, of her grandmother’s. She writes of “the empty woods where her grandmother was shot. She was lucky to be here at all and wouldn’t be, would she, if her mother hadn’t been lucky enough to walk one morning out of the ghetto down the hill to the park and into another life.”
The movement of The Body Is Burden and Delight is multi-dimensional and as mentioned, cumulative. One notable choice in the book that serves this effect is White’s use of the contrapuntal form, which appears as a single poem but comprises two or more works woven together, allowing for multiple interpretations. In the poem “The Body Is Burden and Delight,” which anchors the collection’s center, White uses the form with mastery. She poses a striking, lyric contemplation of the liminal experience of being contained in human form:
Pools make themselves known
after the photographer on the bank
of the silver river he’s always there, my friend tells me
perched on the side waiting for a beautiful
girl, to take her picture
in the pool I slip by him, no longer a girl
but older, as I climb my limbs slip away, too
nothing left but the rush of body through bracken, through
gorse and rose and bluebell little points of sky blue,
pieces of another world echoing in this
White’s ability to evoke powerful connections and resonance is impressive. With this collection, she has created an experience, both spectral and familiar, that will linger within the mind of the reader for a long time.
Sara Verstynen is a writer, editor, and freelance book reviewer from Chicago, IL.
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