What Are You Reading, Sheila Squillante?

Today is my friend C.S.  Giscombe’s birthday, and since I can’t treat him to a pint of lager and a plate of rice & beans or gator sausage with honey at the dive bar we used to lunch at before he moved to Berkeley, I will treat you to some of his poetry. I’ve been re-reading his collection, Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive, 2008), and each time I return to it, I find more to admire, more to uncover and delight in. It’s what I say to my students about how the best poems call you to return to them again and again, offering something new each time. It’s maybe a cliché, but it’s also true. And it’s really true of this book.

These are packed (prose) poems that take up/on much: music, race, geography, topography, histories, jokes, animals, love.  It’s a downright reflective book with a voice I find intimately deliberate.  What I mean is that as I read, I feel I’m the presence of a deliberating mind, a whole energy, even, as it works stuff out. It bristles and rings. It surrounds.

Consider the first poem, “Downstate,”

To have the same sound, to be called by the same name.

Location’s what you come to; it’s the low point, it usually repeats. 

To me, any value is a location to be reckoned with; I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how an event could be talked about like it was you or me being talked about.

Or location’s the reply, the obvious statement about origin; it goes without saying that pleasure’s formidable.

Lots of formidable pleasures dwell within, and not just of the cerebral sort. This is also a poetics of body, and one of my favorite moments appears in the poem, “Two Directions:”

To me love’s an animal, not the feeling of watching one but the animal itself—blunt, active, equipped…

Yes, yes, yes.

To me, (and this construction I borrow from the book—there are a lot of qualifying “to me” moments. As in, Have your own experience. This is what matters to me. Oh, I like that.) there are enchanting if dizzying shifts happening in subject , perspective and voice throughout the collection. In some poems there is the vast horizon:  “Nothing to the sky but its blank, endless chaos,” (“Day Song”); or a moment when “The prairie appeared suddenly like it was a miracle or fortification. (“Prairie Style”).”  Then still others feel, to borrow another excellent phrase, “furiously local” –specific to the speaker’s desires, the smallness of a lived life, internal: “(I’d bought a room in Jeanette Life’s hostelry—the Stone Soup—on the north side and could walk to the archives.)” (“Camp Sites”). Even more so in “Ballad Values,” which is, to me, a delicious list of personal predilections, the sort of things you might want to know about a lover before your first kiss:

I like “short grass” and the way we sang once—James Hamilton and I sang once—about liking meat that’s close to the bone. And I prefer going over the junctions to being part of the argument. I like two buses rocking perilously and metaphor judging you. I’m partial to ugly. I vary about the point where pleasure’s a train of waves. I see how voice is a joke on passion and value the smooth as well as the sweet report.  I like it once you get past the natural boundary.

What I like most about the collection as a made-thing is actually a formal aspect. It’s the quality of tangent & repetition that gives the book its satisfying shape: we’re in the city, we’re in the city, we’re in the city, there’s a fox! Love, love, love, music, fox again. City. Music, music. Prairie. Love. Giscombe does this with subject and image, but also—and this, really, is my favorite part—at the sentence, phrase, and word –level.  It’s a thing that makes me squeal with delight when I come across it in a book or in music. Oh, how I love a braided motif! I love that moment of recognizing it—hey, I’ve seen this before!—and then the next moment of understanding it as something “past the natural boundary.” Something new.

So happy birthday, dear friend. Thank you for the gift of this beautiful book in the world!

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Sheila Squillante rhymes with Chianti and she quite likes that you can take that two ways. She is the author of the chapbook, A Woman Traces the Shoreline, just released from Dancing Girl Press.