Little Spells

by Jennifer K. Sweeney

Poetry. "I am not normally moved by perfection, since I like a little mess in poetry, but when a book achieves the trifecta of truly beautiful balance—precise observation, uncannily accurate words, wildness and depth of heart—it must be as close to perfect as our weird and glorious art can get. Sweeney understands how the profound and the miniscule are interconstitutive qualities of souls and objects in a universe ("Dwarf star with one eye on the moon") and this exploration is inner as well as visible, external. Throughout the book, the speaker is concerned with the continuum of from stones and plants and planets, to finches and fire, on to witches and princesses and she honors each form it takes. But at some point, this study of life gives way to the song of one who is heartbroken on the path to creating life. This voice sings and cries in such exquisite expression of anguish that art and life find themselves gazing at each other in shock. What good is perfection when the most precious and longed-for star—the one that guided the years—vanishes from the huge dark sky? Art remains and perhaps it comforts as it triumphs here. Sweeney is dazzling—if that matters. I think it does. I am abnormally moved by the perfection of this art. I am crushed by it."—Brenda Shaughnessy

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published March 24, 2015

About the author

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections: Little Spells, newly released from New Issues Press, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Hedgebrook residency, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Award from Passages North and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards. Recent poems have appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Linebreak, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, and Verse Daily.

Reviews

[Karen Craigo]

Lots of poets have written about the liminal space between life and death—how consciousness, rooted in the body, becomes spirit. But few have addressed the other end, wherein spirit is first made flesh through pregnancy and birth.

Jennifer K. Sweeney offers a corrective in Little Spells (Kalamazoo: New Issues Press, 2015), a gorgeous collection centered in the pain of trying to conceive.

Maybe this topic has been largely ignored because it’s an experience rooted in the feminine. Although a couple tackles the problem of infertility together, it is the female body where the new flesh is to be housed and where the weight of the issue is measured. Perhaps we lump fertility together with the menstrual cycle—an even more pervasive reality for women, but one addressed mostly occasionally and obliquely, seldom head-on and at length.

Although I have not struggled with fertility, I know many women who have, and they report that the treatment process can be painful, humiliating, and soul crushing. Surely such a harrowing and all-encompassing experience is worth poetic treatment. And Sweeney demonstrates in Little Spells that this territory can sustain an entire book—all ninety-five pages of one.

This was a book that resisted abandonment. Something important was happening, and I couldn’t leave it until I saw it through to its fruition. Sweeney offers so many different views of her theme, from the very first poem, “Abandoning the Hives”:

Wake up, the currents of bees have fled
this hour of seed
dark imaginings in their week—
unsweet feverless drone.

Comb the hillside for sleepwalkers
drowsy on some chemical spool or
beg the swarm box to dance.

This initial fourteen-line poem, ending with its haunting row of empty jars, prefigures the crown of sonnets, “Still Life With Egg,” that comprises the center of the book. The series offers myriad views of the egg: “ceramic … lined with oyster skin,” “maraca,” “first / thought,” or, in number twelve of the sequence,

I held the cool weight
up to the light
this is an egg, tiny clock

of its own making, the shape
of wonder serious on our faces.

My favorite poem in the book is “Sea-change,” which offers the first clear indication that all of the speaker’s struggles have resolved in the realization of her desire:

after the waiting years the leaden

keening oceanside for an answer

from the original dark you emerge

distinct one life perpetually not-there

not-to-come

then suddenly at work with long division

sac of cells we

watched in the flux

out of via negative

you eddy forth

This stunning poem ends with a promise to the sac of cells, named “littlebluefish” or “littlebigheart” by the poet: “I will not forget / the profound absence from which / you began.”

I know this is just a book of poetry. No labwork was involved in its reading—there was no cool medical precision; that which is, by its nature, beautiful and private was not made sterile and public. But when I finally understood that the desire and the suffering and the cradling of that fragile egg had given way to new life, I celebrated. Little Spells let me feel it—and it let me share this particular joy. It’s a remarkable and important book in this way.

[Rachel Rose]

Jennifer K. Sweeney's Little Spells is a collection bound by fierce yearning: the longing for a child to come to her. This great desire, at once potent and mythic, is set against all that cannot be controlled and must simply be borne, be witnessed, be accurately observed and mourned. Sweeney transforms this ache into incantations, unforgettable little spells--sometimes mysterious, sometimes plainspoken--that invoke the language of both the natural and the unseen world to witness, to lament, to call forth the reluctant beloved: "Make of my body a home, I was/an hourglass of salt,/a tarot of bone. Lay me down/under Perseids, let the stars/hold up the night." I am grateful for these poems.

[Gerry LaFemina]

Brenda Shaugnessy in her blurb says about the book that it is nearly perfect. I won't go that far. But Sweeney is a fine fine poet, willing to experiment with fractal moments (as in her fairytale variations), sonnet variants, and fine, free verse lyrics. There's a lot to praise about that diversity of form and style; her language is beautiful and no doubt, most of the poems have heart, making this book a worthwhile and satisfying read.

[Kasey Jueds]

I don't think I've encountered another poetry book that contains both such gorgeous, startling language and... whatever "plot" is in poetry: forward motion, immersion in subject matter and story, longing to know "what happens." But the latter is more complicated than simple forward motion, since I felt, reading Little Spells (which is in part about the desire for, and difficulty in conceiving, a child) both catapulted forward and held in the strange, painful liminal/bardo state the author describes: waiting, hoping, never being sure. The many potent poems set in winter landscapes, and the strange/wondrous poems about fairy tales, especially serve to make the bardo deeply felt and real. And the language, again: luminous.