Review of Ordinary Fissures, a Poetry Collection by Sara Eddy
by Paige Passantino
I’d highly recommend reading Ordinary Fissures in the summer, so Sara Eddy’s full-length collection comes out right on time. Granted, I’d highly recommend reading this book in any season—but the sticky summer heat pulls something extra out of the book, which is a swirling series of confessional poems about nature, love, bees, motherhood, childhood, and overall personhood, bringing the reader into the multitude of questions that tug and linger on the speaker’s heart and mind. What is an “ordinary” fissure? Which cracks in ourselves occur as the result of living, and which are there all along, waiting to be exposed with time?
Ordinary Fissure’s opening poem, “The Sow,” is a perfect start, planting the seeds for the curious, sharp, loving, and quietly furious voice in the pages to come. The sow is “grotesque, compelled / by rage darker than thunderstorms, witches.” Eddy’s first section of the collection (which is split into three) is perhaps its most ominous, full of unheeded warnings and the complex guilt and regret that comes with hindsight. This landscape of emotions plays out against the natural world, taking us from the speakers’ “bitchy,” buzzing backyard beehive to the edges of Yosemite; Laguna Beach to the “unimaginable world” of “stink bugs, mantis, earwig, and silverfish.” Yet the most compelling feature of this section, and possibly the collection at large, is its peculiar sense of time. While maintaining the appearance of chronological order, the poetic memories jump in a way that calls into question how we find, and define, the beginnings, middles, and endings of our own stories.
The second section of Ordinary Fissures is ambitious, and manages to successfully capture moments from the speaker’s childhood, her parental relationships, later formation of her identity as a woman, mother, and wife, and her post-divorce shift toward a fierce and newfound autonomy—”I feel my new self charged / with poisonous glory”—in a mere 18 poems. It’s a thrill to be along for the ride, which is painfully vulnerable at times. “I’m old enough not to care what they think / but young enough to feel afraid”; “I’ve spent a lifetime / figuring out how to have friends / and still I don’t know how to keep them”; Eddy’s verse here embodies the honest, bare spirit of confessional poetry at its finest. Eddy also employs myth and fairy tale to great effect, weaving into the collection characters such as Naucrate, mother of Icarus, just as seamlessly as Goldilocks or images from her childhood storybooks. These stories continue the speaker’s rumination on memory, perception, and narrative, particularly in regard to the choices we make. “What power we have, to decide what is past, / what is present,” she writes, and later: “You must decide: / uproot the patch, or suffer / for the sharp green tang on your tongue?”
We meet the title poem at the start of section three, which sets the reader up for the reflective pieces to come, rounding out Ordinary Fissures with a sense of understated grace and surprise. This final portion is haunted by the speaker’s earlier sense of regret and longing. She laments over perhaps realizing too late that she’s “gone the wrong way for miles and miles and miles”; “All those years I ignored Orion’s whispers”—yet the defiantly self-assured and vibrant voice of “beautiful anger” rings clear throughout Eddy’s conclusion: “I’ll wrap my hair around / my breasts and belly / like a prayer shawl for a mad god. / My prayer will be fuck you.” The ending contains new beginnings, but entirely avoids falling into the cliche of rounding up a collection about divorce and womanhood with a new relationship to save the day. Instead, the speaker meditatively returns to the natural world. “But Pileated Woodpeckers insist. / Bobcats, porcupines, weasels / impel you from the shadows.” Eddy lures us to join her speaker into her own deep woods, to the limits of the desert, and walks us back out again, emerging both broken and whole.
At its heart, Ordinary Fissures is a collection of nature poems. There is no denying Eddy’s brilliance when it comes to writing about the natural world; this is a book dripping with the sap of summer, fireflies; raspberries with their “bright tiny pips,” common plantain, yellow dock, and stinging nettle; “azalea strength,” the loitering scent of hyacinth, and trees that talk to each other about the rain. The lush and sweeping nature imagery makes it all the more pleasant—and humorous—when Eddy drops us into poems that take place in Bed, Bath & Beyond, or when she writes “Google is just trolling me now” while virtually hiking beside the interstate, searching for “unearthly verdigris.” It is also a book about parenthood and personhood, grappling with how little we know, or perhaps how little we are capable of doing. Eddy’s work shines most in these humbling moments, moments where the speaker fights to restrain the “feral animal” in her chest that aims to protect her son “with fox-tooth and blood, chaos and rage,” before arriving at the realization that maybe all a parent can do is “make soup / and pay attention to the stock and the herbs,” just as the beekeeper can only focus on saving “just this one hive.” What Eddy insists is that this is indeed more than enough.
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Ordinary Fissures is published with Kelsay Books and can be purchased here. “Starvation” was published in the Fall 2019 issue of The Baltimore Review and can be read here. Eddy will also be reading with poet Ocean Vuong at 6:30pm on August 24 at the Dream Away Lodge in Becket, Massachusetts. You can find more information on her website: https://www.saraeddypoetry.com/