Danielle Vogel, A Library of Light

 

When we are. When we arethere, we lay together and cover ourselves with our voices. When we are ten, weare also twenty-one. We speak of breathing, but this is a thing we cannot do. Whenwe are seven, we are also eighteen. When we are eighteen, we begin our bodies. Butwe are unmappable, unhinged. A resynchronization of codes, the crystallinefrequencies of stars, seeds, vowels, lying dormant within you. we are theoldest dialect. A sound the voice cannot make but makes.

Thelatest from American “cross-genre writer and interdisciplinary artist” Danielle Vogel, currently an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is A Library of Light (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), acollection that follows Between Grammars (Noemi Press, 2015), Edges& Fray (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) [see my review of such here]and The Way A Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity (Pasadena CA: Red HenPress, 2020) [see my review of such here]. As the press release offers: “Whenpoet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astrallight, she had no idea that her mother’s tragic death would eclipse the writingof that book, turning her attention to grief’s syntax and quiet fields ofcellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prosepoems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in anincantatory space, one in which light speaks.” Composed across three extendedsections of prose poem accumulations—“Light,” “of Light” and “Light”—as well asthe “Postscript—Syntax: a bioluminescence,” Vogal examines the shifting of selfand of selves, light and of light, and the simultaneity of all of the above throughthe complexities of grief. This is, as she offers, a book of light. “This fieldis the first inscription.” she writes, early on in the collection. “A cracklingpulse that set me going. I think words like amniotic, birth, origin,beginning.”

A Library of Light exists as bothexamination and archive of memory, loss, dislocation, connection andinterconnection; of light, working through a translation of how light acts, andreacts. “Sometimes, when asked what I’m working on,” she writes, as part of thesecond section, “I tell people I’m writing a translation of light. Light, likethe memory of a color, of a sound that we can’t quite sense, but is there,nonetheless. Inherited light. cellular light. Interstellar. Memories that havealready happened to someone or somewhere else.” Whereas Ottawa-area poet Robert Hogg worked his lyric as a sequence of extended stretches that utilized aparticular lightness of tone and touch in his Of Light (Toronto ON:Coach House Press, 1978), Vogel utilizes that same element of light but onethat acknowledges its lightness, as well as its weight (or mass), the gravityof each section shifting like sand, until certain might sit lighter than air, andothers, almost too heavy to bear. As she writes:

Light lets the grid of athing respire. Each intersection becomes an or in relation. Imagine theskin of you, all its points of convergence, either through sense or sound,being met at once. The grid begins to glow.

We move in everydirection even standing still. We are let by light. It culls something againstus. The grid is refracting. Light oracles us. Languages us. Reflexes relation. Ibecome beside myself and something else while stationary.

 

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As language contracts, I experiencemy form. Its skin, sensors and bones, its joins and synapses. Language iserotic, sensory. Atmospheric and physical. The living bridge between the two.

 

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Ilike how Vogel holds commas to separate her sections, furthering the suggestionof accumulation and ongoingness to the sequence of prose pieces. One step, andthen another, progressing throughout the length and breadth of the collection. Thepieces, poems, in A Library of Light are deeply thoughtful, lyricallycompact and meditative, working her light through the dark, a call-and-responsebetween the two, each one threading the other’s needle. Vogel holds whatotherwise can’t easily be held. There is such an ongoingness to grief, thegrief described here, described here in terms complicated and even contradictory;the grief over the loss of her mother, a figure that hadn’t an easy presence,and the years of distance they’d had between them. As Vogel writes: “Grief hasa long passage. For months I referred to my mother’s death in the present tense.My mother dies. Was what I said and wrote. What was this slippage? When I foundout, I paced the floor until my knees left me. And then I crawled toward the bathroom,picked up an old toothbrush and proceeded to clean the room with it. I beganunder the claw foot tub. Stretched out, on my belly, my cheek pressed to thefloor, I reached for the furthest corner.”