{"id":2351,"date":"2017-10-31T16:36:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-31T16:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=2351"},"modified":"2017-10-31T16:36:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-31T16:36:00","slug":"not-a-museum-to-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/not-a-museum-to-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"Not a Museum to Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Appearances, <\/strong><\/em>by Michael Collins<\/strong>
\nSaddle Road Press, 2017<\/strong>
\n84 pages, paper, $16.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cNo one wants to hear \/ impressions of the natural world,\u201d Louise Gl\u00fcck warned twenty-five years ago, tongue-in-cheek, in The Wild Iris<\/em>. \u201cIt is \/ not modern enough.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Writing about the natural world in 2017 is an even trickier business. In Appearances<\/em>, Michael Collins\u2019 second full-length collection, however, the natural world becomes the imperfectly perfect site of one man\u2019s struggle to hold onto the fraying pieces of himself within the whirlwind of a numbing, urban, twenty-first century life. This doesn\u2019t, however, turn into a sentimental journey marked by luminous insights or an elegy to environmental ruin. What we get, instead, is a disarmingly genuine and intimate collection of all the thoughts a person walking every day around an ordinary harbor thinks, and all he\u2019s seen, in poems that build convincingly on plain, deliberately understated images: ducks, clamshells, old people sunbathing, gulls, fish, oil spills, and water, lots of water.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That Collins himself realizes the potential perils of his quasi-Romantic undertaking comes through loud and clear in several poems, and adds to the charm and complexity of his speaker. Take the opening section of \u201cEclogues,\u201d one of the stand-out poems of the collection, placed near the end of the book:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I came to this harbor unconsciously.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Seeking a mother made of breezes and waves.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of those sublime lies the soul will tell<\/p>\n

to trick a depressed man up out of bed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Even after I reasoned this was silly,<\/p>\n

I still liked it here, so I wrote poems<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

to honor the landscape for its own sake,<\/p>\n

lending my voice to the slumbering fiddler<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

crabs and their marshland and ducks and swans and clams,<\/p>\n

feeling rather magnanimous, thank you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What\u2019s notable here, apart from the skillfully timed humor, is how subtly\u2014and unexpectedly\u2014the speaker glides from state to state, and from tone to tone. From the high mythical arch of \u201cSeeking a mother made of breezes and waves,\u201d the opening couplet drops to a hard stop, a hard silence, before making a complete about-face. This is just a lie I tell myself<\/em>, the speaker admits, because I\u2019m depressed<\/em>. In the third stanza we get another shift: I <\/em>knew this wasn\u2019t true all along, but I still like being at the harbor and trying to write<\/em>. The poem goes on by acknowledging that nature isn\u2019t \u201csome museum to nostalgia,\u201d before reaching the realization that \u201cthere\u2019s nothing to fear or worship here.\u201d In closing, Collins offers an effectively understated image of the speaker holding onto a fence as a storm approaches. Hairpin turns, psychological acuity, and self-effacing humor\u2014we get these, fortunately, throughout Appearances.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This passage from \u201cEclogues\u201d illustrates another pleasure of this book and a hallmark of Collins\u2019 style: ingeniously compact philosophical statements. What is a \u201csublime lie,\u201d exactly? That could be the thesis of its own essay. And on death, in \u201cKatabasis,\u201d the speaker observes: \u201cIt is not \/ an event; it is \/ a perspective, growing \/ slowly in each unique \/ separate sight.\u201d On death and <\/em>nature, in a passage about gulls shattering clamshells, \u201cSeawall\u201d gives us this to chew on:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

. . . no words<\/span><\/p>\n

to name an act murder. <\/em>Nature, pure<\/p>\n

transformation. Instantly<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the world is only this cycling;<\/p>\n

there is nothing<\/p>\n

I must render.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cleanly sculpted, with line breaks that let us savor the full meaning of this poem\u2019s simple but resonant words, we get a weird chill from realizing that killing holds no moral content in Nature and that our<\/em> seeing, as poets or otherwise, has zero bearing on any of it. And finally, on what it means to try to turn experience into words, \u201cMyth\u201d plunges us headlong into a fast-moving philosophical and personal meditation. Set in short lines that zigzag down the page as quickly as the concepts metamorphose from one to the next, the third-person speaker \u201cwalk[s] until \/ the jagged harbor is \/ a circle, walking until \/ he is himself, until \/ he is also the self \/ he is not.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But perhaps what\u2019s most compelling, most likable, about Collins\u2019 work in Appearances<\/em> is the raw persistence<\/em> of his struggle\u2014rendered fully and quietly visible to the reader\u2014to commune with the soul that\u2019s \u2018out there\u2019 in the natural world and also in us. \u201c[A]ngel i know you here<\/em> in flesh \/ i will not release you \/ until you bless me,\u201d demands the speaker in \u201cGenesis.\u201d And like Jacob wrestling all night with the mysterious angel that could be God himself, that struggle in Appearances <\/em>is often bittersweet. Moments of restoration and solace come as we watch leaves swirling in the water (\u201cFall\u201d), a grown man hugging his dog (\u201cPoem for a Predator\u201d), enormous snowflakes falling down as in a winter globe (\u201cCreation\u201d). Keen disappointment, even outrage, crop up, too, in poems like \u201cDead Fish,\u201d where a whole species dies helplessly in polluted water. But for every blissful pair of retirees whooping over a newly caught fish (\u201cCommunion\u201d), Collins seems to tell us, there\u2019s a plastic \u201cShop&Stop bag \/ that hangs from the chain link fence thrashing.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That there is no final resolution at the end shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise. A mandala has no starting or ending point, as the circular shape of \u201cHarbor Mandala,\u201d a late poem in the book, reminds us. We find in this poem that, despite the speaker\u2019s private agonies and raptures, \u201cducks nap silently \/ in the oak shade.\u201d There\u2019s something comforting in that. And something true, if not comforting, in the act of walking by those ducks while carrying our own, completely other, merely human, emotions. The joy of Appearances<\/em>\u2014its gift\u2014is placing us in these moments again and again, through winter and summer, high and low tide, elation and despair, so we can experience that open, shifting, mandala\u2019s shape of apprehending the world as silly humans.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Michael Collins’ poem “Nightmare of Intercourse with Lightning”<\/a> was a finalist in our 2015 Editors’ Awards and appeared in The Florida Review<\/em> 39.1&2<\/a> in 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hairpin turns, psychological acuity, and self-effacing humor…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2361,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[392,393,6,394,395],"class_list":["post-2351","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","tag-annie-kim","tag-appearances","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-michael-collins","tag-nature-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNot a Museum to Nostalgia - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/not-a-museum-to-nostalgia\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Not a Museum to Nostalgia - The Florida Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hairpin turns, psychological acuity, and self-effacing humor...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/not-a-museum-to-nostalgia\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Florida Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/43\/2017\/10\/Collins-Michael-Appearances-cover-crop.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"171\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"97\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cah.ucf.edu\\\/floridareview\\\/article\\\/not-a-museum-to-nostalgia\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cah.ucf.edu\\\/floridareview\\\/article\\\/not-a-museum-to-nostalgia\\\/\",\"name\":\"Not a Museum to Nostalgia - 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