Given by Liza Katz Duncan

By Michael Collins

Liza Katz Duncan’s debut collection, Given, winner of the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is both a poignant elegy and a sustained meditation integrating reflections on aesthetic perception and the complex interdependence between nature and psyche with deepening mourning of tragedies personal and collective. Its thematic scope allows insights from each context to inform the others, and its variety of approaches offers continued revisioning of and movement of thought and feeling within its central concerns. A considered inner strength permeates the poems, a forthright balance of reflective thought, awareness of emotional nuance, and an intuitive sense of connection between inner and outer, perception and lacuna, love and loss.

“Ekphrasis: Sandy” attends to a sequence of images in the aftermath of the hurricane. The opening prepares us to notice misperception as an opening to insights beyond the frame, within the eye:

In the Weather Underground photos, it appears

no more than an optical illusion: look at it this way,

it’s an eagle’s crest; that way, a snail shell. A trick

of the light, or of the mind.

The sky makes and remakes.

Trees reach sideways: hear us. Under cloud cover,

behind caution tape, a town the bay built and unbuilt. (6)

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The fifth line drops through the speaker’s arrested gaps in perception to an ego-transcending openness to the storm, perceiving the power that “makes and remakes” as it will, not as we comprehend.  Paradoxically, this sense of connection to greater ongoing creation that contains and threatens the speaker’s own opens to images with personal implications:

A daylight moon, bloated over the bay,

pulls the tide high over the bulkhead

the way one might lift a child, their small fingers

struggling. See where the water left

prints of yellow foam for days. (8)

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Here the poem pivots, the speaker following her own associations with the foam and child:

The girl in the blurred part of the photo is smiling.

But then, children see adventure in disruption.

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See the foam blow through her hair,

sand on her tongue. Her sense of time

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stretches only the length of this boardwalk,

where the ocean leaps onto the planks.

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Only foam now, but soon it will swallow

everything in the photo’s frame (9; italics original)

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The speaker associates the pictured child’s psyche with the blurring of the photo in which she appears, a movement towards imagination of and through the child’s experience of both the tactile scene and the felt limitlessness of the present moment. The recurrence of foam again points to an inner significance that connects the girl with the previous section’s imagery. This development is complicated by use of the imperative, more immediately involving the reader. Various, perhaps interdependent, layers of witnessing are implied, allowing the concurrence of the child’s experience and the ending’s foreboding.

The final section again qualifies the image’s ability to convey meaning: “Debris superimposed in the foreground, / as if to justify yet another skyline shot. / The flashbulb blotting out the tiny sun” (10). Another flaw in a photograph prompts the speaker’s intuition, this time towards the limitations of aesthetic response to tragedy. However, the apprehended negations of objective meaning seem to work paradoxically to empower aesthetic imagination to intuit present psychological connections – and also to allow them to resonate across a plurality of potential interpretations.

The uncertainty itself is one psychological gift of the storm, allowing new perspective into inner and outer material – and the complex psychological webbing of associations that connects them.  “Apostrophe” attributes a duality of destruction and witnessing directly to the ocean through direct address:

Punctuation of the morning after: comma between

red sky and sailors’ warning, white space where a storm cloud lowers.

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Where the bay breaks away, the sentence ends: a waning

crescent of peninsula, barely visible

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but for the broken buildings, the ambulance lights.

Ocean, even now, even shaken, you hold the memory

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of words, of worlds that failed slowly, then all at once. (13)

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The overt connecting of the ocean’s images with poetic composition complicates the speaker’s turn to address it directly, casting the ocean as both witness and mirror, implying a similar duality for the speaker. This intimation of an inner emptiness that is shared with the outer world takes a different form in “Wawa Poem,” in which the water’s emptiness takes on an unconscious quality:

The sound of water

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against the seawall, brash and arrhythmic,

as if something underwater

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is arching, is aching, to come up for air. (17)

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The unconsciousness is not mere inner-emptiness; it also contains psychic material waiting to be realized. Such contents can be projected into the physical world in its attempts to come forth to consciousness; however, such projections also present opportunities to notice nuances of, in this case, the natural world that are unique, considered moments of external witness.

The sectioned poem, “I Wanted To Be Surrounded By Water,” can be read as an corollary process of such material “coming up for air.” It opens by reconstructing the speaker’s wishes while returning to live in New Jersey:

I wanted to be surrounded by water. To find home

easily on a map. I wanted streets with names

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that were self-explanatory: Harbor Way. Shore Concourse.

I wanted to mark, on the shoreline,

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their disappearance—the way,

at the site of an accident near Highway 35, someone

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hung crosses, plastic flowers, photos of a young girl—

I wanted, also, to leave something behind.

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To document what was, and what will never be— (19)

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Water is associated with a sense of organic connection and significance here. The young girl’s photo recalls the earlier picture, but the memorial forebodes a move away from the preceding fantasy of clear paths toward an ending that sounds like an elegy.

The next section unfolds a litany of things “I wanted” from the anticipated life, one of which is “waiting for the ocean’s sharp punctuation” sitting quietly beside it (20). In this section, the memory of a cherished future at the heart of the book declares itself: “I wanted children, despite the dying world.” This opens to deeper disclosure of the psychological experience of loss:

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The child we lost—a girl I don’t know.

She occurs to me in photographic shades: ochre,

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burnt sienna, vintage bronze. Memory

has softened her outline, as the bay

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smooths edges of broken glass,

returning it graspable,

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shatterproof. In the haze

of the neon sky, flecks of her face

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flash in and out of focus. (23)

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Three previous themes braid together: the “photographic shades” of memory, the landscape’s own capacity to contain and reflect psychic material, and the ways poetry can foster the interweaving of psychic presences that may only be evoked in language: “I had to write myself back into this place, if only to watch it / fall apart” (24).

Part of this writing “back” forms a series of interspersed poems entitled “Given” that use Whitmanesque anaphora and catalogue to present contexts of destruction and ongoing life brought together by the storm:

Given a factory town, smokestacks that leaked poison into the bay until it swelled,

glowed green, too liquid for its frame

Given the sky breaks and remakes, pours its wet rage on the tortured apartments. (11)

The tone is largely unsentimental, the perspective as keenly aware of humans’ conscious destruction as the unconscious destruction of the storm, both of which intermingle injuries to the natural environment and the body:

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Given the storm thickened on them

and day by day she taught them how to drink, to chase

sickness with ocean

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Given the empties, an array of colors like so many boardwalk sno-cones,

and how they drank, thirsty children all

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Given the storm stayed for days,

crawling into bed with them, nursing them to sleep

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Given they drank to disappear a brew of rainwater,

liquor, and ocean: where else

was all that liquid going to go (18)

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The cycles of consumption are subsumed, on an organic level, by the same storm that aggravates them. This is interestingly and inversely correspondent to the oppositional potentials evoked in the juxtaposition of humans’ organic and cultural basis in water with the storm’s jumbling into ruin of one person’s attempts at a coherent life:

Given ancient civilizations evolved on floodplains, thrived for thousands of years,

and there are those who flourish still: who don’t hold onto trappings, or have none

to hold onto, who fold their dark tents onto their backs once a year and walk to

higher ground

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Given our bodies are just our bodies, 78 percent water

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Given my neighbor Rebecca, who had nowhere to go; who hadn’t packed, was

wearing all her valuables when the storm hit

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Given the wedding ring from a previous marriage, the bruise it made on her swollen

finger a parenthesis left open

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Given this house and everything in it is everything she’s ever made or done: an oil

painting of a fisherman at high tide. A clam shell for an ashtray. Five rooms. One life

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Given all of these floating through the flooded house like driftwood (14; italics original)

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The plurality of possibilities presented in this series corresponds with the recurrent title’s own. The litany can sound like a series of preambulatory clauses whose resolution yet awaits, things that must be understood as a foundation; however, it can also read simply as a list of what has been offered, from which the poet may make a life.

Interspersing these poems gives the sense that the collection is always beginning and always continuing, an existential truth that pervades the book. It corresponds with an overlapping vision the speaker develops over the second section that concurrently offers witness to self and other. “Vessels” does so through associative shifting from an observed “line / of horseshoe crab shells.” The speaker imagines their eyes

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facing, then, everywhere but

the home that did them in, and their

once-inhabitants. At some point, every vessel

has to watch its contents die:

sinking ship, vase of cut flowers,

a tumble of crows from the nest.

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You died when the last

  of the horseshoe crabs did. What gets me

  is I didn’t feel it happen. (44)

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Her mourning for the crabs, extended further in other poems, is not an identification or unconscious projection; her own loss offers a paradoxical source of compassion, connecting despite – and through – pain.

The series of poems involving Kristina show this dynamic on an interpersonal level, the speaker primarily a listener. These pieces at times record local history, especially through Kristina’s traumatized perspective. At other times, the speaker records aspects of Kristina’s stories that resonate with her own reflective grieving:

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Outside, wind picks the bones of the frailest trees.

             She dresses in the dark. The daughter

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has put herself to bed again, closed the door to keep

             the monsters out. Seeing this, her heart cracks open.

She’s shared homes with monsters.

             Doors don’t stop their ebbs and fluxes

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from a darkened hallway to a restless mind;

             they enter quietly, as floodwaters seep

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through fault lines in the plaster. (31-2)

The first image evokes the fearful and exhausted mood of the scene, which shows both Kristina’s empathy and understanding – and her human limitations. The speaker hears and relates this story without judgment or gloss. The connection to her own material arises in the psychological implications of “monsters,” whose ability to haunt us by sneaking through our psychic defenses into our thoughts threatens all of us, though the monsters themselves may differ considerably. The speaker and Kristina are also connected through aspects of storms that split their homes’ foundations.

The inner implications of and responses to such hauntings are the compelling subject of the final, longer poem, “Landfall,” which revisits the book’s central concerns and opens to the speaker’s ongoing life with the psychic presence of her child – and without the child herself. Like the “Given” poems, it uses anaphora to structure the speaker’s gathering and working with psychic materials in their own self-reflective dimension. However, here the structure is more fluid; the repeated phrases shift and morph over the course of the poem, changing themselves in the process of the integrating meditation they facilitate. Water returns, again paradoxically able to open paths forward despite – and because of – its destructive potentials:

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Dear water      great absolver

Everything I’ve loved I have squandered

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I will myself to look only at the ocean

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And not my ruin      while every day

Somewhere a village sinks from view

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Pounded hour after hour by rain and relentless wind

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Every day somewhere an ice fortress dismantles

Thawed with the permafrost      every day somewhere

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The ocean is in the road

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Streaked with glare from unpredictable evening sun (57; italics original)

The speaker’s inner embrace of complexity mirrors this conception of the water, holding opposing thoughts and inner truths together in consciousness:

Dear daughter      no

I don’t get to call you daughter

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To salvage what could not be replaced

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I didn’t carry you long enough

Hard enough

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We are dealing with categories here that we don’t normally see

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Not a daughter

An almost

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An aberration

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Dear almost      given and ungiven

Every day somewhere in a doctor’s office

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A nightmare makes landfall (59-60; italics original)

Again, juxtaposition of personal suffering with that of others forms pain into a bridge of compassion. Correspondingly, lingering feelings of guilt are complicated by both the aesthetic perception and gratitude for connection within – and with – a flawed and dying world:

What does it say that I find beauty in the ruin

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While others said they could not bear the sight

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What does it say that when

The water appears unchanged I feel absolved

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Even as wave after wave of poisoned fish

Washes up on the shore (64; italics original)

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The concluding lines bring home the book’s patterns of imagery and its structure of asymmetrical weaving:

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Dear almost

My body remembers you though it

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Owes me nothing

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In dreams I walk with you

By the water

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And the pain rises      as the mosses

Rise from the snow too soon      you

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No longer belong here

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In this dredge where nothing else

Can grow

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You no longer belong      though the water

The water      remembers (65; italics original)

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The final lines point towards both the external, independent existence of the water and its presence as a psychological image, similar to the dual presences of the storm in earlier poems. The inter-contextualizing inner and outer witness once again return to the loss in the speaker’s inner world through the sense of the ocean’s remembrance. This paradox befits the book’s abiding process of finding moments and aspects of psychological connection between the partially or momentarily congruous lives that make up our inner and shared worlds. In the moments of complex and felt insight it offers us, Given offers a considered and moving model of incorporating tragedy into ongoing life.

You can buy the book here: https://www.autumnhouse.org/books/given/

Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines.  He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Visit notthatmichaelcollins.com.

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