Boats in the Attic

by Alison Powell
(Fordham University Press, 2022) 

Reviewed by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy

Poetry for the End Times: Boats in the Attic

After more than two exhausting years of pandemic atop a daily procession of environmental catastrophe, social and economic turmoil, war, terrorism, and political upheaval (and those are just the morning headlines), it’s no surprise to find the word “apocalyptic” bandied about almost reflexively to describe our current state of affairs. And while this isn’t exactly breaking news—people have been living through terrible times since time began—somehow these days  manage to feel even worse than usual. In this context, there’s something incredibly refreshing about Alison Powell’s second collection, Boats in the Attic, published by Fordham University Press in fall 2022. Winner of the 2021 Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize, the book not only inhabits our fraught contemporary space without getting bogged down in artistic doom-scrolling, but, more importantly, points a way forward for living when it feels like the End Times have arrived. 

Boats in the Attic is divided into three sections, with a distinct pleasure in the balanced and confident way they unfold from one to the next. Thematically, much of the first section circles around the importance of naming and knowing as a means of connecting to the world. From Adam and Eve to middle-school journalism class, Powell evokes a primal and formative sense of exploration. In “Etymology: Heaven” the process of naming (and therefore knowing, or even possession) takes center stage: “Adam has a word for all— // even the beasts are given titles — / naming being the first form.” She returns to Adam and naming again in “Missing File #3: Panthera Leo Leo, Or, A Civics Lesson” with a more personal perspective:

          Sometimes I think of naming as a paternal act: Adam sits, petting the animals 

          as they come to him, making of them the first little zoo. Other times, I think 

          naming is about disbelief, our lack of faith—that if we don’t have a word for 

          something, it won’t let us hold it anymore.

The second section turns this process of naming and knowing inward and includes poems exploring parenthood, such as “The Book of Revelation,” “After the Birth of the First Child” and “Upon Turning Forty.” The litany “If We Speak of the Hurricane” bursts at the seams with lyric energy, and the incantation of “if”—with its dual sense of doubt and possibility—provides a touchingly grown-up echo to a child’s incessant “why”:

if he is just a boy

asking about justice at the mall;

if his father and I cannot help but love

his locomotive of curiosity, its erratic perpetuity,

shark, shots, Mars, if we wonder how it will end;

if zoo doctor, if astronomer, if madman 

The third section brings the internal and external worlds of experience together, making it clear that there isn’t really a binary between the two to begin with. In particular, the sprawling “Missing File #7: Nomen Nudum” tells about the discovery of a skeleton called “The Red Lady” by geologist, distinguished eater, and Oxford professor Rev. William Buckland in 1823. Along the way, the poem passes through summer camp memories, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the word consume, a description of how Powell’s son “makes sense of death,” as well as what lab analysis in the 1950s actually discovered about the skeleton. 

Boats in the Attic illuminates repeatedly how today’s default understanding of the word apocalypse—referring to disaster or fiery destruction—must be reconsidered. As Powell writes in “The First Word” near the start of the book: “The First Word // of the Book of Revelation / is apokalypsis // meaning unveiling.” More than a friendly linguistic clarification, this reads as a statement of intent, applicable to the entire collection. Poetry, to the extent that it’s meant to “do something,” is an act of unveiling and discovery that we as readers are invited to join.

One delightful part of this unveiling is a series of prose poems appearing over the course of the book. These “Missing File” pieces illuminate topics as diverse as Paleolithic art, honeybees, Aristotle’s History of Animals, middle school, Larry King, Transhumanism, cryonics, ortolans and birdsong, 19th century archeology, and much, much more. Taken together, the poems reflect a vision of the world that is deeply curious and intellectually expansive. An ample notes section references the factual bona fides behind the poems, but the poems themselves never come off as feeling strictly documentary. Furthermore, the prose poem form is an effective choice for these pieces, as it enables a clear presentation of ideas while showcasing Powell’s ironic wit and associative range. What we get is a personal voice, even as the poems foreground the weird and wondrous:

When I was a child, I licked manuka honey off the spoon when sick. I yanked handfuls of honeysuckle from the neighbor’s vine…Together the girl and I would  collect horse apples in the front yard and examine them carefully for caterpillars. We’d return at dusk to her house, with its one room just for the birds, carpeted in newspaper, branches anchored to the windows and extending all around. (from “Missing File #2: A Few Facts About Bees”)

At the heart of Boats in the Attic is the poem “The Book of Revelation,” an extended meditation on parenthood and the early years of the poet’s children. As with the “Missing File” poems, keen observation combined with approachable language helps convey a deeper sense of lived experience. Watching Powell observe her children opening up to the world around them, I found myself nodding in recognition of the many moments she describes, such as her son’s love of dinosaurs or when he ponders the mysteries of stars and planets from the backseat of a car.

But beyond the small wonders of domestic life, what I find most engaging about “The Book of Revelation” is its embodiment that parenthood isn’t the end of the world but only a beginning. We are left with a defusing and reframing of apocalypse, from destruction to discovery: 

He that has an ear

let him hear it

I would fasten their small hearts

to my heart with reins

For now  let me watch

as their bones

slowly inch forth

entrepreneurial

as a farmer

or a new religion

The title poem “Boats in the Attic,” which appears in the third section, highlights the possibilities of this new understanding of apocalypse. It begins in familiarly grim territory: “It had been so dry. Wildfires / blooming into a continent of ash.” But the poem shifts to a resounding note of optimism and revelation: 

In the end, daughter, it was

the thing that was called for

years holy. You and me,

sitting criss-cross applesauce,

pretending to row

all the way to shore.

Here in a few short lines are all the reasons why we should keep coming back to Boats in the Attic: clear-eyed poetic vision, love, and the power of imagination enabling us to reach shore when the waters are stormy. 

Yoni Hammer-Kossoy is a poet, translator, and educator, whose writing appears in numerous international journals and anthologies. A graduate of the Shaindy Rudoff program in creative writing at Bar Ilan University, he is the winner of the 2020 Andrea Moriah Prize in Poetry. Yoni is originally from Brooklyn, NY, and has been living in Israel with his family for more than 25 years.

The Occulus

by Stelios Mormoris
(Tupelo Press, 2022) 

Reviewed by Robert Dunsdon

Sometimes, more often when we are young, a revelation might be offered to us: a signifier of something other, if only we would use our eyes. Ignore it and nothing changes, acknowledge it for what it is and your outlook, indeed your very character, is transformed. A drift of nettles swinging rhythmically in the shadow of a low stone wall was enough for me; that, and the apparent sanctity of the light denied them. It taught me to look out and beyond, that a breath away from the limitations we impose on ourselves are the intricacies and subtleties of everyday life so often unnoticed in the contemporary fog of urgency. Whether the author intended the title of this fine collection to convey something of the above, I can’t say, but it seems that such a feeling hovers around these poems in the imagery and almost peripheral intimations employed. 
 
Stelios Mormoris holds dual Greek and US citizenship, but has spent much of his life in Paris, whose cultural heritage, you suspect, has played no small part in the development of his work. His is a delicate touch confidently applied, and his understanding of form and technique, allied to an appreciation of aesthetic values, lends his poetry an extra dimension; elevates it. Moments of enlightenment or recognition are enhanced by classical allusion, magnified in imagination, or detailed with a refreshing originality. His descriptive powers are considerable: throwaway lines, like his account of tourists “grazing on the excess grandeur of gargoyled boulevards” combine with the quietly moving, as when likening poinsettia leaves “fluttering in slips of breeze off Biscayne Bay” to the quivering of his mother’s lips on reading a devastating telegram.

The compensations and intrusions of memory feature strongly here, which is hardly surprising given the importance of a faculty which, as we get older, is our shadow and our guide. Among these, two poems in particular stand out, not only for their discretely emotional pull, but also in the structure of their telling. In one, Mormoris revisits a rented cabin in which his mother and four fatherless children once spent a hot, dry summer. The act of walking over the decayed and peeling linoleum feels indecent, “as if pressing the dead inside its board.” The other is a poem detailing a domestic scene which is brought wonderfully alive with old photographs, oregano and lavender, fresh mint on a wet green melon, and a blue porcelain bowl from which his mother lifts a spoonful of soup to:

a child’s lips and
she says agape mou
and her bracelet
is decidedly cold
and thrilling as
loneliness can be.

I’ve referred to the author’s understanding of the bits and pieces of his craft: the learned skills of syntax, pace, half-rhyme, assonance, and all the rest, without which a poem can become loose and woolly, or worse still, mere prose cut into sections. He knows that construction and content are, or rather should be, indivisible in the making of art. He also knows these devices should be applied sparingly and be barely discernible; a principle seen at its best in a charming piece about one of his dogs, Zeus. Comprising a string of twenty-three couplets, it’s a lovely depiction of a man and his dog growing old together, walking and playing. It’s a snapshot almost: a picture of companionship, love and momentary contentment produced with seemingly little effort, although the whole effect is only made possible by a disciplined sensibility.

That particular quality is used to good effect in a poem hinting at something you cannot immediately grasp, as a driver encounters fog and fears he is, or might become, lost. “You have passed this field / through pleats of time,” we are told, and the fog becomes a memory of fog. Nicely descriptive of the landscape, with spruce trees, “whose branches swung out / like the hems of ballerinas as they curtsied / in tension, quivering.” It’s an intriguing piece that probably needs, and certainly deserves, a second reading to fully appreciate its almost ethereal atmosphere.
There’s a mingling of sentiment, colorful experience, and acquired wisdom in this expansive collection, and leafing through it feels as if you are encroaching on a private odyssey. You might be blinking at a spirited sea or brushing up against bougainvillea; encountering disappointment and regret or picking up fragments of remembrance from the movement of air. You might savour: 

Tournedos of barley
    crammed into thick honey
laced with thyme, stubborn
in the roof of your mouth
    and how it grows on you,
after penitent flows of salad
      of cucumber and olive oil.

or feel:

the sea foam
like torn lingerie
wrapping your shins
as you wade towards the shore
to the intermittent clicks
of worry beads

and staccato cicadas.

These gently persuasive lines are just a taste of the poet’s expressive abilities; quite literally in the first example, when recalling a sermon for the dead where he cups the kernels of barley which had dropped to his plate “nimble as beads snapped from a necklace” and raises this “palmful of religion” to his mouth. “Kaiki Beach,” from which the breezy scene above is taken, begins “how necessary it is / to lose yourself  / in tangles” and recounts how a priest with a “pouring laugh” held court in a taverna, kissed a pregnant woman cradling her belly with one hand, and lifting a glass of sparkling quinine with the other, then cut into his filet of white fish “anointed with drops of lemon.” He is conveying in deceptively simple terms the feel of a moment whose impact will grow in later years, and doing so without fuss or exaggeration, with just the right word in just the right place. It’s an art not easily won.      

As I finished reading this first-rate collection, a poem by Louis MacNeice came to mind. He wrote of a baywindow “spawning snow and pink roses against it / Soundlessly collateral and incompatible” at which the room becomes suddenly rich. Something of that sense, of that impression of quiet illumination comes across in these poems which are beautifully composed and never less than thoroughly absorbing. 

Robert Dunsdon lives near Oxford in the UK. His poetry has been published in Ambit, Purple Patch, Pennine Platform, The Blue Nib, Decanto, Candelabrum, The Cannon’s Mouth, Picaroon, Allegro, The Crank, and others. His book reviews have featured in Tupelo Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, The Lit Pub, and Poetry International Online.