A Changed Vision

By Valerie Abraham

daye Phillippo is unabashed by her unorthodox journey into academia and publishing, and it shows in the down-to-earth and fearless quality to her slim, moving volume of poems, Thunderhead. She writes about what she knows and loves, giving each poem a personal, even intimate, touch. She invites the reader to see the glory and beauty of an “ordinary” life with the delight and love that she herself clearly has for that life. Her use of imagery and contrast recalls the vivid and startling scenes of T. S. Eliot, and her fondness for discrete Homeric similes turns a simple nature vignette into a more profound observation on the deeper nature of the world. This word painting is on full display in her poem “Open Window,” with a simile for sleep that shall stay with me as much as Shakespeare’s “sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.”

. . . When the day closes its orange eye in cloud bank, it is best to let sleep flow in like creekwater around stones, smooth the day’s sharp edges with a sound like chuckling, as if tomorrow can’t help but be better.

Perhaps one of the most striking themes and motifs in Phillippo’s poetry is the recurrence of dialogue between past and present, as though the “cloud of witnesses” gone before us were rising up to give their commentary on our lives. The result of this commentary is a kind of antiphonal voice running through the collection, as Phillippo brings us first into her own world, and then invites the past to add its voice to that world, which in turn gives us a fresh perspective on an existence less bound by the present—or time of any kind. When so many are tempted to forget their history entirely, or patronizingly analyze it through their own modern predisposition, Phillippo turns history into a character with a mind of its own, reserved, but ready to address us with gravitas.

This antiphonal “historic” voice shines brightest in her extended images. Consider this epic simile woven into her poem “Decorating the Graves,” about visiting family graves and contemplating the reality of death in a pre-modern world:

Such grief before antibiotics, before our time, a grief we never knew the way we never knew the heft of the black hand pump standing, top of the hill against the sky. Never knew what it was to wrestle the iron handle up and down like a strong man’s arm. Never knew priming the pump, waiting for water to splash out.

Any pedant can pontificate on what it must have been like to live in any age but our own, but here we catch the glint of Phillippo’s word-painting genius especially clearly: a concrete object, known to her and described to us, vividly drawn for us as a relic of the past that she is imagining, simultaneously anchored in what was and what is. This tangible conduit conjures the rest of the lost world she describes, where mothers grieved their babies and husbands buried wives lost in childbirth. Her poem moves us from what could easily remain, outside of poetry, an abstract historical observation into a viscerally-felt moment. This voice of the past in turn informs the idea of place that Phillippo explores. To contemplate place, one realizes in reading these poems, one must also contemplate the demands of time and relationship. The reader finds himself irresistibly invited into a world where threads of history are revealed in the peeling paint of an ancient door, fierce love is expressed in the unpretentious pulling of weeds, and “flyover” country is radiant with the grace of God in a thunderstorm. Thunderhead is woven of the kind of poetry that will ruffle your indifference and leave you with changed vision.

Valerie Abraham grew up in France, fell in love with Idaho, and now resides in North Carolina with her husband, Matthew, and their two little boys plus one on the way. The kitchen is her main creative outlet, but she also loves illuminated manuscripts, tall mountains, and long conversations about the Great Books. You can find her podcasting at museandhearth.com.