Inmost
BY Jessica Fisher
(Nightboat Books, 2012)

Jessica Fisher’s long-awaited second book, Inmost, winner of the 2010 Nightboat Poetry Prize, does not disappoint. These are poems both meditative and ferocious in their intent to see and say clearly. Many of Fisher’s poems are written against the backdrop of wartime, though perhaps not only a specific war (Iraq, Afghanistan), but the ongoing violence of humanity. Specifically, Fisher explores how violence imprints itself in painful and unexpected ways on the bodies of mothers and children. These “inmost” bodies — generative, unfolding — are also the bearers of elegy, as birth is both shadow and companion to death, and as the child enters a mortal form that will someday disappear. Fisher draws connections between the literal hauntings of war and the metaphorical connotations of our most intimate states of being. “Or is death the mother,” she writes, quoting Wallace Stevens, in her striking poem “Elegy,” which serves as a kind of resting point for the book’s central themes.

Fisher is an exploratory poet. She writes toward and around her primary concerns — mothering, attachment, language, and loss — in a manner similar to a lyric essayist. One feels that her whole book is a depiction of the mind at work, written so fluidly on the pulse of thought that these poems must, like the mind, be approached carefully:

As Kimiko Hahn points out in her foreword, one gift of these poems is the way in which “everything simultaneously radiates connotation.” Perhaps Fisher’s poetry reads as dramatically figurative because her language is stripped of much literal reference. White space surrounds her compressed, lyric lines; so too her abstract titles, “Derive,” “Ravage,” “Pare” set the reader navigating an opaque landscape that both frightens and delights. Here, language carries the weight of what’s absent or hidden:

just as subsequent lines return to tender, lush image: “& the bed of clover/where the doe beds down—“ (p. 19) The world rushes back to us as grounded and seen — ultimately, safe.

If difficult in subject matter and density of language, Inmost delights with its confidence, acuity and surprise. The reader becomes a witness of the poet addressing words themselves, at times traveling the etymology of individual verbs to discover where a wound first appears, and the way that language mirrors this thin line between violence and beauty. “And harrow for the soldiers’ formation, the birds’ migration” (“Derive,” p. 10).

Ultimately, Inmost follows a mother’s encounter with the violence of what she’s created, which is a mortal body. What is beautiful (infant, child) is almost most vulnerable. What is weakest and in need of protection is nearest our capacity to wound and destroy.

or:

The mother here is frame and threshold, much as each poem enacts a relentless interior we cannot look away from. The mother’s job is to teach her child how to survive in a world where mere survival is precarious. Each life begins on that, “Cliff where the cradle uncradles,” and the child emerges, exposed. (p. 23, “Pare”) As in this example, Fisher explores the way that words reflect our unreliability. She often follows a noun with a verb of the same root that shifts meaning. What is a cradle if it can uncradle? She also illustrates the paradox of likeness, as in the words, “raise” and “raze,” one meaning to build, the other to destroy (“Mortar,” p. 8).

Fisher’s first book, Frail Craft, won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award, and Inmost marks a mature poet fully at home in her craft. For one thing, she’s a master of pacing. Fisher interweaves lyric poems with prose poems that speak more directly. In this controlled variation, the reader encounters both the pleasures of fragmented lines — often in couplet form — and the relief of sentences: “As she nurses, my nipple takes on the color of her lips” (“Want,” p. 32). Likewise, each of the book’s four sections alternate prose poems with lyric sequences, while remaining consistent in voice and tone.

Ultimately, Fisher directs and redirects our gaze toward the body, made both of flesh and language. In her last lines, Fisher reorders an unpublished Keat’s poem:

If red life is our blood, our vulnerability and means of wounding, it’s also our aliveness: the one true thing the mother gives her child as offering. “Now I need a red kiss, she says, and gives me her lips” (“Familiar,” p. 37).