Sackville, NB: Devon Ave. Poetry Books, 2013.
Review by Kathy Mac and Ben Lord
“Allowable sway” usually refers to the amount
of movement designed into the structure of a building or bridge. However,
Marilyn Lerch uses the phrase to describe how “treetops, like keening women,
bend and lift” (“Once I Dreamed” 32). This boundary-confounding slippage between
natural and artificial marks many of the best moments in The Physics of Allowable Sway.
The book includes a number of poems that
grapple -- intellectually, emotionally and spiritually -- with problems of
identity and mortality in our contemporary world. In “Paul,” Lerch explores
what it means to know someone you never met; in this case a young man who killed
himself, whose words she read years later.
She became connected to Paul precisely because
he removed himself from the web of connections: “When all was sick flux of love
turning / you were fixed and pure, your act decisive” (28). Over and over in
the poem she asks “How does one decide?”
-- to end your life, to remove yourself from knowability, to hasten the
dissolution of your corporeal and memory identity and become fathomable only
through your writing. To move from “one” to none, or all.
Not
everything in The Physics of Allowable
Sway is so dire. Some of the most diverting poems treat serious subjects
lightly. “Child, Child” exhorts someone “eye-level with no-nonsense knees” to “stay
down there / as long as you can” only “occasionally tilting your head / up the
long length of your future” (58). Other
poems here are pastoral, and pleasures to read in part because of Lerch’s articulate
yet accessible diction. “Sunset at Cheticamp” ends with a description of the
way
the molten
globe slowly sinks
into its own
lava sea while
birds skim
the closing crease
and the
small green light
on the point
winces
on and off.
(24)
In
“Leaving the Human Behind” Lerch takes up again to her quest to understand the
limits and strengths of human interactions with nature, by returning to the
cave walls at Pech-Merle,
to come upon
that hand
splayed in
red ochre on the rock,
like to like
across
millennia.
She ends the poem, and the book, imagining a
time when:
whoever
finds this,
if you still
can,
feel the
feeling of
how much we
loved
life.
In this beautiful. self-published book --
produced using nineteenth-century letterpress technologies at Gaspereau Press
-- Lerch clearly aspires to produce an artifact as compelling to her future
readers as that ochre hand is to her. Like the images on the wall at Pech-Merle,
The Physics of Allowable Sway is a
palm-print not just of Lerch’s life, but of the cultures, experiences and
histories which culminate in this book.
