No Silence in the Fields (BHP Chapbook Series)

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No Silence in the Fields (BHP Chapbook Series)

by Rachel Mennies (Goodreads Author)

4.25 of 5 stars 4.25 · rating details · 4 ratings · 1 review

A home and its broken ghosts are given voice in Rachel Mennies’ seance-like No Silence in the Fields. Its several speakers frighten and comfort, whisper and wail, with Mennies as their unflinching medium. Forging and foraging, even through vicarious anguish, for family stories chained to dilapidation, Mennies pulls memories from voluminous quiet and cold ground. In a place...more

ebook, 32 pages

Published February 29th 2012 by Blue Hour Press

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Apr 19, 2012 Laura Davis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Rachel Mennies’ debut e-chapbook collection No Silence in the Fields (Blue Hour Press, 2012) is a heartbreaking narrative of a couple’s love that breaks beneath the cold realities of winter. The scene is set in the first poem, “The Barn,” which wonders, “Whose red shoebox, whose poisoned apple.” This list-poem first catalogues meaningless objects as if anthropologists were excavating them years later. It then turns from the tangible to recall events and emotions contained within the walls of the...more Rachel Mennies’ debut e-chapbook collection No Silence in the Fields (Blue Hour Press, 2012) is a heartbreaking narrative of a couple’s love that breaks beneath the cold realities of winter. The scene is set in the first poem, “The Barn,” which wonders, “Whose red shoebox, whose poisoned apple.” This list-poem first catalogues meaningless objects as if anthropologists were excavating them years later. It then turns from the tangible to recall events and emotions contained within the walls of the barn, asking “Whose constant uphill, whose flame from the stove, / whose lost child, whose tired body?”

Bodies are a central topic of No Silence; the fragility and rawness of people and animals: a cluster of cancerous cells, the delicate rib of a dead cat, a calf freezing to death. Loss surrounds the ill-fated story of the books main characters, M and V, a couple who sets up house in the aforementioned barn for the winter. Their story is told in multiple voices that alternate between M, V, and an omniscient speaker. Why they have come to the barn for winter is never addressed directly, but a simple guess is that they have no other place. The details leading up to their circumstances are less important than where they find themselves, however, as Mennies’ vivid images and lyricism weave a desperate tone through each poem, keeping the action in the present.

What we do know is that work is scarce for M, a salt-of-the-earth, hardworking man: “I slough the dusty skin / of horses; I listen to the hearts of dogs.” V is depicted by M in the same poem, “M Introduces Himself,” as, “the woman I love” who “makes coffee from water / and grounds. In the earth, the sleeping perennials / are hers.” An old-fashioned, gendered division of labor exists between them; these partners operate separately, each in their own domain, tending to their own needs. It is soon revealed that V is expecting a child, but she is also sick. The first time V speaks, she says, “Hello, lump—size of a million / curious atoms, soft against my hand,” as she finds a tumor in her upper thigh. Later, the inevitable miscarriage is personified in the haunting title, “Miscarriage is Like a Large, Hungry Gull.” Throughout the narrative, V and M are reminded again and again of their own mortality and the realities of being a human animal.

Mennies fearlessly tackles the messy business of bodies, both living and decaying. When the vitality of spring and summer arrive, they offer only bitter pain for V as she faces her own barrenness. On a trip to the farmer’s market, she is fenced by an “avalanche of blueberries” and other ripened fruits: “Around me, everything reproduces recklessly” and she is left feeling “light / as a bag in the wind, alone.” While this image may seem overwrought, by now Mennies has earned it. The final poem comes full circle, again depicting the things that witnessed V and M’s familiar story of fading love. These objects are heavier now, weighed by the meaning we have now seen hidden inside. Mennies’ beautiful, solemn first collection of carefully crafted poems is filled with the bittersweet evidence of what’s abandoned after love is gone.

first posted here: http://www.weavemagazine.net/2012/04/...(less)

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Jan 09, 2013 Gabe rated it 3 of 5 stars

Mar 08, 2012 Nick Goodmanson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Mar 02, 2012 Lesley marked it as to-read

Shelves: poetry, folks-i-know

Apr 22, 2012 Rachel Mennies added it · (Review from the author)

Shelves: favorites

Mar 03, 2012 Chapin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: poetry

Feb 29, 2012 Blue Hour Press added it

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About Rachel Mennies

Rachel Mennies is the reviews editor atAGNI. Her work has recently appeared inAlaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review,andWitness.She won theLeonard Steinberg/Academy of American Poets Prizeand received her MFA in Poetry from Penn State, both in 2011. She currently lives in Pittsburgh and works for the University of Pittsburgh....more

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