Paradise is Jagged
By Ann Fisher-Wirth
Terrapin Books | 2023 | 116 pages
The cover of Ann Fisher-Wirth’s sixth book of poems, Paradise is Jagged, is awash with color and verdure—a mass of grasses and leaves and flowers. The painting is titled “North Mississippi” and the verdure is not green but blue, red, yellow, and brown. Like the cover image, the title, Paradise is Jagged, conjures a world at odds with itself, preparing the reader for recurring themes of loss, restoration, devastation, beauty. From the start of this collection, we are thrown into the oppositions that underlie the poems of this prolific, sensitive, and articulate poet.
The book opens as an invitation with the poem “A Young Stag at Dusk.” A young deer appears at twilight and then is gone, the poem ends: “May the stag sink back into the forest. / May the petals drop on the grass. / Whoever you are, may you be at peace / in this great silence, where only the birds speak.” Here is an invocation, the image of paradise, a cosmos at one with itself, a conjuring. Yet set inside this poem is the feeling of an uneasy marriage of the world of nature with the human world. The speaker is a wise child: “Sometimes I am afraid. / At three I knelt on the back seat / of my mother’s car and, looking out the window, / said There is so much to see / and so little time to see it…” Perhaps it is our mortality that underscores all that seems “jagged” in our paradise. Whether it is from human foibles, greed, the intrusion of disease, or mere mortality, we live at this impasse, for which it would seem that there are no words, for which nothing suffices to help us understand our losses, our devastations—and yet, these poems do; these are poems that speak exquisitely into that silence like birdsong.
In the poem “Ironing,” about a father who is away at war, Fisher-Wirth describes the quotidian life of a mother and her daughters, mundane domestics and then a twist: “We press handkerchiefs at our own small boards / as she [Mother] deftly noses her iron into the gathers of skirts….” And then, his death: “And I recall the chapel—my navy blue wool dress, / my fear to touch his face, / one bronze chrysanthemum petal / falling on his hand. Our mother telling the undertaker, / Let me fix his hair. / He never wore it parted quite so high.” So tender a moment to choose to dramatize, to render, to paint in order to reveal a jagged edge in the shattered paradise of this family.
“Namesake,” the final poem in the first section, is a layering of stories, one of which is a sister’s cancer and pending death. The jagged world of nature, once again, looms: “…sometimes from the dark / muck of suffering, joy rises / like the lotus flowers/my sister and I beheld / the summer of her last illness, / completely covering the pond where we walked, / white and pale golden above their leaves.” Fisher-Wirth’s juxtaposing themes of beauty at the edge of devastation are again reinforced here.
It is to nature the poet turns, repeatedly, when there really are no words. Juxtaposed against what would seem to be the human thirst for violence, against the broken, jagged, would-be paradise. There is clearly irony in the title, “jagged” is an understatement—and “paradise” an overstatement. The phrase is both oxymoronic and paradoxical. These moments in her poems, that focus our eye on these tiny micro-paintings where beauty remains, capture the last frontiers of this lost paradise.
The poems in Paradise is Jagged are set in Japan, Switzerland, Costa Rica, and in the poet’s back yard in Mississippi. In the poem “Astonishing Light” the speaker is a professor, teaching writing to prisoners: “We make this drive weekly, / Patrick and I, an hour and a half through the Delta / toward our students who are imprisoned / for anywhere from three years to life…:
Today, watching bamboo sway in the dull
November rain outside my bedroom window,
I need to think about things other than
White supremacy, state-sanctioned premature death,
Systematic undereducation, racial profiling,
The carceral state, the legacy of slavery—
The phrases Patrick uses when he speaks
Of what we’re fighting, our students’
Ground down lives, and the way Felon
Will follow them once they’re out.
I am exhausted and angry and need to think
only about leaves thick on the ground,
a blue wintering sky, the tile roof
of the gleaming house next door.
And the gingko seedling I found in the hedge,
struggling for light amidst bamboo and wisteria.
The gingko seedling becomes a metaphor for the students at the Parchman Penitentiary who are using words to craft light and freedom into their difficult lives, who are “struggling” to reveal themselves in the midst of the suffocating and free-growing flora. As the poet mourns the private and the shared world, it becomes an act of restoration, evoking a silence of both grief and gratitude, showing that what is broken is often prompted to repair itself.
While the natural world often offers solace to humans in Fisher-Wirth’s poems, her work also proclaims that as guardians for the planet, humans have failed. For a short moment in “Wooden Comb” the poet, here as teacher, paints her despair, for the disparity, the incongruity:
My heart has grown numb. Today, buttercups blossom
in the muddy fields, along the parking strips
all over town, and my students calmly discuss
what forms of life will exist beyond apocalypse.
I cannot reconcile how the world is sweet,
how the world is burning. Next door
in the trees a little bird is chipping at the night
Along with the loveliness, along with the verdure, along with the jaggedness and the rich imagery of life in the midst of loss: the scratch-scratch, the every-which-way-ness of branches, with the light and air surrounding them, these poems continually move a reader to transcendence. After a little research, it is discovered that the painter of the book’s cover is in fact the poet’s mother, a Nebraskan-born woman who refused to show her paintings, but whose paintings now fill the walls of the poet’s house, and as the poet remarks: “My children’s houses…. My sister’s house, her children’s houses. Every time I lie in bed I gaze at two of her paintings.”
Geri Lipschultz’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Ms., The New York Times, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing, Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II, and elsewhere. Her one-woman show was produced in New York City by Woodie King, Jr.
Header photo by Tony Campbell, courtesy Shutterstock.
