On poet Lisa Forrest's "To The Eaves"

Buffalo based poet Lisa Forrest brings an unusual range of life experiences to her work.  After a hitch in the Army studying Counter Intelligence and eight years as an Occupational Therapist, the Cottonwood, Minnesota native returned to the University at Buffalo to study poetics and information studies.

She's currently a Senior Assistant Librarian at Buffalo State College's Butler Library, where in June of 2005 she founded BSC's Rooftop Poetry Club and Reading Series.

The epigraph of her first collection of poems To The Eaves (BlazeVox Books) is from Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian: "These are his words.  [God] speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things."  Its appropriateness is immediately evident in the book's opening poem "Porcelain":

       In the end
       it's all the same
       want for
       tenderness.
       Grounded on my knees
       I clean house for days
       outside water trickling
       constant from the roof
       steadily reminding me
       we've fallen mute, you & I
       the kitchen faucet twisted
       tight drips stubborn
       this tired porcelain sink
       scrubbed clear of you
       bares an opaque sadness...

Like Robert Creeley (a longtime influence who was once famously dismissed as a "domestic poet"), Forrest subscribes to William Carlos Williams' dictum "No ideas but in things."  Her work aspires to an economy of expression that combines the taut, breath determined line of Projective Verse with a predilection toward the deep image or natural landscape as a conduit of human emotion.

In "We'll All Be The Same," her bare bones minimalism makes bold, intuitive leaps with elliptical concision:

       What’s left to say
       truth uncoiled
       shifting
       and unshelved
       paneless
       window gaze
       windmills distant
       twist out of turn
       these swiveling days
       sandy
       shadows
       hover south
       no one's
       the wiser
       we'll all be colorless
       come December.

To The Eaves follows the emotional trajectory of a failed relationship, but Forrest is in no way a "confessional" poet in the conventional sense.  Instead she finds metaphors for heartbreak in the close observance of nature and the ecosystem of her own backyard: in the piercing, buckshot silence of Buffalo's snow felled trees in "They Are All Willows,"  in the love songs and life struggles of birds and small animals found underfoot in "A Winter Afternoon, And Everyone Sighing" and "Black Dog's Lament".   

In this extraordinary first collection's title poem, an orphaned sparrow is the surrogate for the poet's own aspirations, and her lyricism resonates with empathy for all the fragile creatures of this wounded world:

       This is our
       love song
       never the end
       fluorescent
       day undone.
       In my fist
       unfurled
       the smallest
       sparrow
       slowly blinks.
       Half winged
       to the eaves
       crackling twigs
       blazing
       leaves.
       This is our
       song love
       our love
       song
       tumbling.

To the Eaves is published by Kenmore based "post avant-garde" publisher Geoffrey Gatza's BlazeVOX [books] .  It's available locally at Talking Leaves and Rust Belt Books, and from the publisher's web site.

--R.D Pohl

Comments

[Geoffrey Gatza]

Hi Bob,

This is a great review! Buy _To The Eves_ here

http://www.amazon.com/Eaves-Lisa-Forrest/dp/1934289876/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212690914&sr=8-6

[gp]

Hi Bob, very beautiful review on Lisa's work. So perfectly stated. Cheers - gp

[Jennifer Campbell]

Thank you Bob for making people aware of Lisa's powerful work- a beautiful book!