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Review: My Infinity by Didi Jackson
The Frenzy to Live: A Review of My Infinity, by Didi Jackson; Red Hen Press; $16.95; 96 pages; September 3, 2024
Review by Emily Rose Miller
Didi Jackson’s second collection of poems, My Infinity, is a quiet, pensive reckoning with life and death by a speaker uniquely suited to discuss such enigmatic subjects. My Infinity follows the speaker of Jackson’s first collection, MOON JAR (Red Hen Press, 2020). Readers of MOON JAR will recognize that the poems in My Infinity continue to grapple with the aftermath of the poet-speaker’s late husband’s suicide. While these books complement and expand one another in delightful ways, My Infinity can be read as a stand-alone collection.
The book presents poignant, direct moments that meditate on the speaker’s grief, moments as in the poem “AFTER MY HUSBAND’S SUICIDE I VISITED A PSYCHIC IN CASSADAGA, FLORIDA,” which reads, “and I hoped for a way / into the dark // an escape hatch from this world / toward his spirit.” Likewise, in the poem “VIGIL,” Jackson writes, “I’ve learned how to keep / ashes in the firebox that heap / as high as decades. / They remind me of / his ashes, the ones / I keep on my nightstand.” Such lines owe their power to their gut-wrenching specificity. In their specificity, the words become universal, speaking to the grief, the loss, and perhaps most importantly, the living we all experience the world over.
My Infinity is broken into five sections. The second section consists entirely of poems about and from the point of view of Hilma af Klint, a Swedish artist who lived from 1862 to 1944 and is considered to have made some of the first abstract art in the Western world. Af Klint was heavily involved in spiritualism, namely Theosophy, which informed her art, writing, and life. Jackson’s portrayal of af Klint is a fascinating addition to the collection and begs the obvious question: Why?
It is clear that af Klint’s work fascinates the poet-speaker, and that af Klint’s feelings of grief and inquisitiveness echo the speaker’s own. But the biggest moment of connection arrives with the poem “THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE,” which ends: “Like Hilma, I want to decode it all, / but I’ll never know why / I was left a widow. / Only that the two swallows are me, / dividing into two selves, my desire reawakening, / my sorrow forever rooted.” We see, too, elements in which the speaker finds uncanny connections between af Klint’s life and work and her own, as again in “THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE,” when Jackson notes, “[my husband] was only 44. The same age as Hilma / as she started the paintings of the temple.” Jackson’s poems surrounding af Klint underscore grief’s universality, as if to say: this may not be a unique struggle, which I take comfort in, but it is as uniquely mine as yours is yours.
For all the ruminations on grief in this collection, there is also joy, persistent and worth clinging to. In “THE LEISURE OF SNOW,” for example, we join the speaker on a quiet day as she witnesses “the leisure of the snow / falling like a Rothko // over the morning.” Almost prayerfully, the speaker allows the reader to sit with her in this moment of reprieve from the harshness of the world, saying, “I prefer to beat // the dawn; but this I shouldn’t have to explain: / for the morning is naked and beautiful // and yawns many times before turning / on the light. I am there // to see.” Yet, even here is the hint of hurt with the enjambment of “I prefer to beat.” Such subtle pain is masterfully rendered here and in the rest of the collection. Witnessing the soft beauty of the natural world is enough for the speaker on this morning. In the midst of life, so often filled with loss and turmoil, the quietness of this moment must be enough.
Still, the speaker finds joy even in pain. On multiple occasions, the speaker tells us that she suffers from migraines, especially after the exertion of sex. In “‘WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU SEE,’” she says, “Frank Stella would be proud of my migraines / especially those that come after sex— // exquisite pleasure, then blindness” … “Under this geometric spell // and pills like wasps beneath my tongue, / I am the closest to my true self, // and I secretly love my agony.” Such lines remind us that life is an amalgamation of every emotion and experience, some good, some bad; without one, we could not experience the other. For the speaker, her “exquisite pleasure” and her “agony” are forever intertwined, a fact she not only seems comfortable with but embraces. And this is the driving truth of My Infinity: “so much of living is about death,” yet “[we] too catch the frenzy to live.”