[06/02/24] Countryman, Liz: Green Island

Tupelo Press, paperback

Publication Date: June 2, 2024

Publisher Marketing: "Load every rift of your subject with ore," wrote John Keats to P.B. Shelley just six months before his death. It's this line that I thought of again and again while reading Liz Countryman's capacious, ore-filled lines. Ore: a rock or sediment that can, with effort and skill, be treated, refined, forged into something of great value. The poet's ore is memory, or memory and thought, or memory, thought, sensation, and desire: all these elements are richly moving through nearly every moment of this astounding book. Liz Countryman mines childhood for its longing, its intense sensations, its loneliness-a father's face at a drive-through, "a pile of tethered whipped-around balloons"-but she also stays resolutely in the present, finding there the parent's "soft anxiety," the perennial wish for stasis and movement at once. "I want everything to live," she confesses, and it's because of this desire that the poet is compelled to describe, to give life to the dead, to dig in the garden, to rub her hands across the wood of a table, to "shove my face into distance like a bouquet." This voracious relationship to the here and now presses firmly into and against the need to understand the past and all the longings it has deposited, like a residue of silt, on the skin.