Firewatch

by Jan Verberkmoes

FIREWATCH lives in the porous recesses of recollection and the uncertainty felt when re-entering traumatic psychological and physical territories. White space as the natural silence of the page--the indefinable, yet present matter that pushes the text into place--permeates the collection as a kind of repression. Italicized fragments wind through the poems as an other-worldly tether that binds the speaker to the subconscious voices of its othered self. These elements grow together into a larger portrayal of the speakers' evolving relationship to the quiet violence of deterioration, to a threatening and threatened landscape, and to the fractures between perception and comprehension into which they slip. Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published January 27, 2021

Reviews

[Matt McBride]

Messianic and menacing, violence hums in the margin of every poem. It reads like a dark fable in verse with precise yet personal imagery grounded in the natural world. Reminded me in some ways of Andrew Grace's Sancta.

[Kent]

I am fascinated by the landscape created by the poems. In particular, how the poet is often at a border between nature and the domestic. Imagine a lake house. But the poet can just see a light in the window of the lake house. Or a farm house, but the poet has been lured into a side pasture. The poems are in proximity to the domestic, but not all the way there. And in this space, there is a "he" who lurks in threat. And where many of the poems can pose as variations of this situation, each poem has a fresh inventive feel.

In fact, if this book were structured so that the poems were presented as a series of single poems that all contributed to this overall landscape, I would be even more enthusiastic than I already am. It's the gesture to another layer that leaves me puzzled. Why are these elegy poems, and why are they in a different font? How should that fit these elegy poems into the other parts of a section, and the overall fabric of the book? It's a stretch that I'm not entirely certain of.

[Ella B]

these poems are great on the page but absolutely incredible read aloud. such a pleasure to have been able to listen to her.