Paisley Rekdal's Imaginary Vessels Reviewed at LA Times

Craig Morgan Teicher reviews Paisley Rekdal's fifth book, Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) for the LA Times. "[It] deserves to be her breakout book," writes Teicher. More:

Over three pages — Rekdal tends to write long — the poem narrates an afternoon spent with a friend (who happens to be an academic theorist) and her young son, for whom the speaker has bought some bubbles. The billowing bubbles he blows become a metaphor for the gentle push-pull of longing and revulsion that may be the truest form of strong feeling: “Through the stream of bubbles/ I watch her wipe her son’s streaked face, recall/ my washing machine at home which has a setting// labeled ‘Baby Clothes.’ The store model/ wore a pink-and-blue sign reading,/ Don’t You Want One?”

After wandering through thoughts on a painting, her friend’s academic work, and a great deal more, Rekdal ends with a line that recalls Robert Lowell’s famous conclusion to “For the Union Dead,” (“Colonel Shaw/ is riding his bubble,/ he waits/ for the blessèd break”). As her friend packs up to leave, Rekdal writes, “A world blows up.// The mother and child float by in it.”

Her relinquishment of the dream of motherhood in “Bubbles” is both passive and filled with a quiet grief. This capacity to balance contrary emotions is what I prize most in Rekdal’s work, what is most useful and vivid in her poems. The consciousness behind these poems is hard on itself, hard on the world, refusing to suffer fools and foolishness. The severity of Rekdal’s vision — the word “unflinching” is sometimes carelessly applied to poetry, but it’s the right word here — is at times frightening. Her “Birthday Poem,” perhaps a nod to Bishop’s “The Bight,” is both hard to stomach and, er, delicious:

It is important to remember that you will die, lifting the fork with the sheep’s brain lovingly speared on it to the mouth: the little piece smooth on the one side as a baby mouse pickled in wine; on the other, blood- plush and intestinal atop its bed of lentils.

Read the full review at the LA Times.