My Multiverse

by Kathleen Halme

"My Multiverse is a contemporary 'Metamorphoses'-- a collection of finely wrought shifts and surprises." - Laura Kasichke

My Multiverse is Kathleen Halme's fourth collection of poetry.

Genres: Poetry

83 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[Roya Sabri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathleen Halme’s collection, My Multiverse, a collection of objects sung together. It is a rising from the earth that is grounded in the earth all the same. It is a healing of fragmentation through lyric. Halme approaches the material world and its object through myriad cultural lenses: Native American, Greek Mythological, and contemporary American. She pulls apart the materiality of the objects and sews them together in the lyricism of her poems. In “Orisis Rising,” Halme writes, “He has passed through / and he is passing, this dead man / revived by words of love” (43). The relationship between the history of an object and the present tense action of it in the real world is what most motivates Halme’s poetry and is what makes the object of her own book so active in one’s hands.

[Helen]

My Multiverse, Kathleen Halme’s fourth collection of poetry, is a hidden gem in the poetry world. The volume is the product of an ambitious enterprise, in which a collection of poems about the act of collecting comes together to form a tangible volume, My Multiverse, which even then, is a temporal object. If anything, this is a volume about transience. Although one may collect things, these things will disappear, many times when we least expect them to. The volume is divided into six sections. The first one, “City of Roses,” comprises a single poem of the same title. In “City of Roses,” Halme writes:

My neighbor collects dryer lint,
candle stubs and paper egg cartons.
He melts the wax, stirs in the beard of lint
and pours the slurry into egg compartments.
For winter solstice he brought me
a log and a sack of fire starters.
This is a form of coolness.
What sustains us shouldn’t ruin us.
How do you like your life?

The volume opens with the act of collecting, a trope that is followed through the rest of the volume. Halme writes of a neighbor that collects “dryer lint,” an inane and useless item, yet seemingly valuable enough for him to save. “What sustains us shouldn’t ruin us,” Halme writes. And one realizes that what sustains the neighbor is not the only act of collecting, but also the act of transforming of the collected lint into fire starters. He creates. What sustains him is the act of recycling, of not letting anything—no matter how useless—go to waste. Halme ends the stanza with a question to the reader: “How do you like your life?” Or, rather, how is satisfaction of one’s life directly tied to what one collects?

[Meghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Halme has an original eye when looking at classic literature or mythology. In her Osiris Rising, Halme writes a beautiful poem about the love between the gods, Isis and Osiris. Rather than entering through the lens of the story, she enters the poem with the image of a cloudy, wet day and “the small stone statue of Osiris / waking from the dead – / a body not yet emerged.” From this unromantic stony image, and the even less romantic first image of the poem as “days of green sop” Halme writes a love poem. Focusing on the beauty of Isis’s desire for her husband, rather than the gruesome events of Osiris’s death, Halme describes the key point of the Egyptian myth, the moment when Isis restores her husband to life, in the author’s words: “A dead man cut into parts / and sung back together by love.” In this poem, Halme also creates an ars poetica. Who else wields words in the manner of Isis? Only the poet holds such power. With her words, the poet herself turns the inanimate statue into a man, a man worthy of a love poem. At the end of her poem, the speaker states: “He has passed through / and he is passing, this dead man / revived by words of love.” Curiously, she employs both past and present tense in these lines. Although perplexing at first, Halme’s words make more sense when put in context of the power of a poet. While the words of love from the fourth stanza are clearly those of Isis, the words of love in the final part of the poem are those of the poet, a word magician in her own right, capable of making this stone Osiris a man again.

[Hikari Miya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathleen Halme’s My Multiverse is a refreshing and interesting collection of poems that explore topics such as transformation, emotions of love and depression, mythologies from various cultural backgrounds across the globe, and lines from works such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. “I want to speak through transformed bodies”—that is exactly what Halme is able to do with stunning clarity and detail as she expresses feelings of hatred, sadness, and love through resurrected characters such as Osiris from “Osiris Rising”.
Halme has interspersed her idea of her multiverse through several of her poems. A multiverse is a hypothetical set of possible universes (including parallel universes and the universe in which we live) that form everything in existence. In Halme’s book, her multiverse is comprised of works of fiction and fairy tales blended with movement, science, facts, order, chaos, and human error, emotion, and loss that tend to result in transformation. In “Note”, she opens by stating “Somewhere there is order,/a multiverse of order.” She goes on to describe an alternate life she “could have” of happiness, generosity, and being loved; she ends with two lines that describe her current reality: “Now the pills are marvelous. I/feel the tremendousness of love.”

[Andy Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halme’s My Multiverse is a masterful ode to place, tradition, and often tragic events. She pulls on strands most familiar to her – the city of Portland, the Finnish Kalevala – yet she is sure to do them justice by weaving in a multiplicity of narratives. It’s no easy feat, rendering reality in such a way. She mindfully incorporates, for example, the traditions of the First Nations in the Northwestern United States in “City of Roses,” a poem about Portland. In the same series, alongside “blocks and blocks of ornate iron-fronted buildings," are “elegant Klickitat baskets” – clashing cultures and times that share a sameness of space. This is the “Multiverse” she examines: “Worlds without end, a multiverse of cascading universes,” one that is as much ours as it is hers.

[Vincent Hiscock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halme’s phonetic lushness and intelligence orients our sense of her sensibility, the carapace bearing over her capacious shifts, stanza to stanza, which opens her imagery and grounds her commitments to language and to clear-sightedness concerning the transforming forms that constitute our cosmos.
City of Roses proclaims:

Story is the absorption
that we live. A spirit’s experiment
married to a brain.

I’m scrubbing off some DNA,
a hundred years of pushing on a door.
The grime is thickest near the knob…

We are all infinitely interesting,
then there is the world—the inner
city’s aggregate
of intricate particulars.
Here’s the world in rain.
Leave or learn
to crave its pulsing.

Tilled earth is tilth,
taking power back,
meeting basic needs.
You think we’re green?

There is the story, that absorption of experience precipitating the particularity of any given “I;” there is also poetry, this accretion of particulars, their pulsing, working as our tilth or nodal point: rejuvenating, regenerative. This voice and its wily sing-song, which celebrates only with an edge that might also take the air straight out of any run-of-the-mill, naïve, unguarded statements it might encounter, reminds me of Plath’s elocution. Halme’s poems, though, continue to probe a sense of the self as flowing darkly, the stolid-I broken into continuum. Throughout, this poetry is consummate, translucent, refined.