Sky. Pond. Mouth.
by Kevin McLellan
(YAS Press, 2024) Reviewed by Joyce Peseroff
Sky. Pond. Mouth. is Kevin McLellan’s fifth collection of poems, and winner of the first Granite State Poetry Prize. That McLellan is also a videographer, photographer, and creator of art/book objects is reflected in the shapeliness and precision of his writing. Whether entering the ecosystem of nature, literature, or bodies in motion, McLellan’s work defines implacable boundaries and the desire to permeate them—beginning with the book’s title. Three one-syllable words suggest a confluence of air, water, and hunger, but the end-stops silo their contact. Sky. Pond. Mouth. balances the lure of detachment with the urge to connect; typographically and lyrically, the book embraces negative space in its urge to discover some positive energy in a series of fractured natural, social, and emotional spheres.
McLellan’s language enacts the ambiguity of the world, beginning with various landscapes in the book’s first section. In “Always Something Falling,” “The lake // is a mirror, then it isn’t.” Moisture on a tent floor “might be condensation from / my own breath that beaded / above my head & the-once- / a-part-of me rained.” Notice how “a-part” is also “apart,” and how “rain” erases the separation between indoors and out, body and nature. McLellan interrogates many sorts of boundaries; in poems like “Bloodroot,” the speaker is a plant, and its diction downright bloody: “’cause rooted in taint;” “’cause red;” “suicidal petals ‘cause.” In “Interrupted Fern,” the plant’s bipinnate fronds each have a separate vein, as the visual separation of dashes and stanza breaks spar with the sense of wholeness in a one-sentence poem:
gap—blade—gap
—my portions died
back—the blade—
back into the gap—
Of the longer poems that punctuate the distilled lyrics of Sky. Pond. Mouth., the first section-length piece, a prose poem, quotes A.R. Ammons: “is freedom identity without / identity?” Part meditation, part reminiscence, and part self-interrogation, “The Corridor” constructs, section by section, a passage for a speaker who “break(s) each morning as if emerging from the sea—this underworld of disorientation and gasp, and these pressing thoughts about entering a room.” Fellow-passengers include a man on a bus whose “handsomeness” the speaker detects “needed care, and I imagined him with me,” and memories of telling his mother “I need mornings to be quiet. But this morning, for the first time, she said nothing, and it felt like death.” Is identity a consequence of need, and is it possible to be free of it? In the final section of “Corridors” McLellan concludes, “Out of the closet. There are reasons to hide.” What follows is a counter-quote from Angels in America author Tony Kushner: "To exist in public demands performance."
How does a gay man perform in everyday life, knowing the risks of self-revelation? In “Regarding What Was Lost Before I Knew It Was Taken,” McLellan spies a man locking his bike: “Is it the manager of the natural foods market? ... He didn’t acknowledge me. As if the look we shared never happened.” Inside a café, behind a window, on Facebook, or camping, McLellan wonders, “Is it the man?” The poem ends with McLellan crossing boundaries “in front of a glass window, … this time on the outside,” after:
the moment I
now longer
needed
to fear
the given
you-are-positive
news
taken
within.
The shadow that AIDs casts on the poem’s conclusion revises the light in which it’s been read.
This retrospective charge reoccurs in the book’s final section-length poem, “Winterberries.” Completed in the aftermath of surgery that removed a second testicular cancer, the poem begins, “My thoughts have no place / to go, except more inward—.” Yet the speaker can’t help observing what’s around him: a frozen river; winterberries that “from afar look like specks of blood / on the snow, like perforations;” and a place where “wind made the light and an ash / tree seem one.” Though “in other words, I’m a eunuch,” the speaker can’t help looking—present and past framed by a visceral experience that has altered what a statue, a cello, a poem, or a stand of winterberries can signify. “Winterberries,” with the afterword that follows, recasts the reader’s understanding of the preceding poems, especially the Ammons quote and its relationship to sex. The reverberations are like a chainsaw’s cutting through bone.
The attention that McLellan’s publisher, Yas Press, has given to the design and production of Sky. Pond. Mouth. is worth noting. Every poem begins on the right-facing (recto) page; this makes for the spaciousness McLellan’s work demands—its staggered margins in prose and verse; its brackets and erasures; its play with received and invented forms. “Narrative,” which begins with most words in its first nine stanzas crossed out, continues with a series of double columns that can be read both left to right and vertically:
But a few pages deeper, the two columns read separately; blank space isolates words in each column and one column from the other, while section divides from section:
The book’s visual qualities reinforce and echo McLellan’s language in a gorgeous synesthesia, and the publisher’s precision allows each nuance to come through.
The Granite State Poetry Prize will be awarded annually to a collection of extraordinary quality by a New Hampshire poet. In choosing Kevin McLellan’s Sky. Pond. Mouth. for its debut publication, the prize honors both a beautiful object and a brilliant excursion into the nuance of how thinking feels, and the trajectory of how feelings emerge, in the aftermath of loss.
Joyce Peseroff's sixth book of poems, Petition, was named a "must-read" by the 2020 Massachusetts Book Awards. She is the editor of Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. Her poems and reviews appear in Arrowsmith Journal, On the Seawall, Plume, and on her blog, So I Gave You Quartz. She directed the MFA program at UMass Boston in its first four years.