Succession: Poems

by Mary Swander

Book by Swander, Mary

Genres: Poetry

49 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[B. Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I love this poet. There's so much Iowa.
I didn't care much for the first part, but section two and bits of three were phenomenal. I should've figured that a section called "Needlepoint" would resonate.

I slip into your dress.
The cuffs close
around my wrists.

The collar lies
on my chest,
a thick vein.

Now I'm in your hats,
coats, gloves, each one
folding back into my body.

I slip into your blouse,
the buttons dissolving,
the buttons, black tears.

The threads unravel,
crawl into my arms,
spin dark

green cocoons.
Just beneath my skin,
wings are beating.

I slip into your sweater.

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was shocked by how much I enjoyed Succession. Swander's verse was in some ways very simple--relatively straightforward vocabulary, largely simple structure--but in other ways she doesn't shy away from density, reaching powerfully into the past and into the small magic of living with real seriousness and with an honest appreciation for the improbable and impossible. You can see it in "Song" which ends "And the moon, rising over your bed, was a host. / And your body was eaten." The words are easy; it's the arrangement that generates the densities of the poems.

The whole book fits together really closely. It's broken into three sections, "Lynch's Window", "This House," and "Let Down the Nets" each of which has its own sort of story and which dovetails nicely with the other two. "Lynch's Window" is probably the most strictly historical, its title poem narrating a 1493 execution and the rest of the section thinking in relation to that in various ways. "This House" is more intimate and familial, and "Let Down the Nets" sort of navigates both of those. It is this section, in poems like "Sea-Woman" and "Succession" where the words most fly off the page, but the earlier sections are also really interesting and effective as we are brought into the rich and somewhat dangerous world as memory where we can find the speaker saying "My body the whole shore by dawn" as the culmination of a communion and family history is written into the global by virtue of how we approach it. I like the way the poems grapple with the imagination as well as with the autobiographical, and in many ways the strongest poems are the ones that didn't leave me feeling like I had acquired any additional information about Swander herself.

Highly recommended.