{"id":3765,"date":"2019-06-18T17:58:52","date_gmt":"2019-06-18T17:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=3765"},"modified":"2019-06-18T17:58:52","modified_gmt":"2019-06-18T17:58:52","slug":"griefs-spun-to-gold","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/griefs-spun-to-gold\/","title":{"rendered":"Griefs Spun to Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

Venus in Retrograde <\/em>by Susan Lilley<\/strong><\/p>\n

Burrow Press, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hardcover, 123 pages, $20.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

In his essay \u201cFear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,\u201d Tony Hoagland asserts that many contemporary poets are leery of the narrative mode because such poems require commitment to development and continuity. Those holding that view, he says, are drawn to the poem that is \u201cskittery,\u201d that \u201cwould prefer to remain skeptical,\u201d and that \u201cprefers knowing to feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Susan Lilley\u2019s collection Venus in Retrograde<\/em> is an elegant example of the reasons narrative poems still deserve a place in our contemporary poetic cosmos. Her poems diligently interrogate the past while avoiding the excesses of sentimentality and self-indulgence that are often associated with narrative (\u201cconfessional\u201d) poetry. Lilley\u2019s poems also demonstrate that \u201cknowing\u201d and \u201cfeeling\u201d are not mutually exclusive methods or goals.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cChampagne Road,\u201d the second poem in the book, is this couplet: \u201cThere must be an easier way to quit a house \/ than to touch everything in it.\u201d Those lines encapsulate both the primary thematic concerns of the book\u2014love, loss (and its corollary, new beginnings)\u2014and the ways in which Lilley\u2019s poems reach out to touch (and to clarify and animate) the \u201ckitchen laughter, \/ hallway recriminations, [and] shower singing\u201d that are the accompaniment of a life richly lived.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The book is arranged along more or less chronological lines, and some of the most endearing poems are those addressing the foibles and joys of puberty and sexual awakening. Lilley\u2019s sure eye for the telling detail is evident in \u201cExperienced: Jacksonville, 1967,\u201d in which the speaker and her cousin attend a rock concert as an adjunct to church camp. In the bus on the way, a boy \u201cstood up and burped the alphabet;\u201d when a \u201cboy way too old\u201d showed an interest in the speaker at the concert, her cousin \u201cgrabbed my arm and close-mouth screamed,\u201d and when he asked how old the speaker was, \u201cI said, I don\u2019t know.\u201d And the result of these transgressions? \u201cWe had to write extra Ten Commandments \/ for not staying with the group.\u201d Lilley maintains an affectionate distance from the stories the poems relate, relying on a wry tone to provide the commentary.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In a similar, if more reflective vein, is \u201cSong for a Lost Cousin,\u201d which nicely illustrates the ways in which these poems strike lyric notes as a complement to their narrative intent. The middle of the poem finds the girls \u201cpowdering our faces \/ geisha white, love potions \/ in the blender with nectarines \/ and stolen Cointreau.\u201d And later,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Even the peacocks I love<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>are shadows of my first, a bird<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>now dead for decades, once<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>opulent and princely on a dirt road,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>calling for love against black<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>storybook trees and a moon cut<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>from tracing paper.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The rich imagery makes implicit the importance of the experience and its indelible place in the speaker\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lilley is a mature enough poet to have lived through the deaths of parents, and several poems focus on the circumstances of those losses. \u201cA Man in a Hurry\u201d chronicles the sudden death of her father, how \u201cOn the Sunday we now know was his last\u201d \u201che fell \/ into a long moment and stayed there, \/ stayed no matter how we called him back.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cPalm Court,\u201d one of the strongest poems in the book, begins as an elegy for the speaker\u2019s mother but expands to become a meditation on memory itself. Standing with her own daughter near her mother\u2019s childhood home, the speaker wants \u201cto ransack the air itself \/ for evidence of afternoon \/ piano lessons, dark braids \/ flying behind a rope swing, \/ hopscotch songs in the street.\u201d But then comes the honest and moving truth:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>But our faces are not<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>yet dreamed of,<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>here at the very place<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>her girl laughter might still<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>be trapped in the trees.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That lovely and unexpected juxtaposition of past, present, and future exemplifies just one way in which these poems often push beyond mere narrative to reach for the transcendent.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anyone who is a Florida native, as is Lilley, or who has lived long in the state, will appreciate the elegiac allusions to mid-century Florida that appear throughout the book, the \u201cburnt cake \/ perfume that citrus refineries blew,\u201d the beach houses \u201cat the end of two-track driveways \/ soft with sand and flanked by \/ crowds of hissing palmettos \/ and sea grape.\u201d Nostalgia is an inevitable adjunct to such imagery but also there is the stamp of authenticity in it, that the reader is taken by the hand and led by a credible guide through a rich landscape that has vanished or is disappearing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of the greatest strengths of Susan Lilley\u2019s poems is that they present the reader with a bifurcated subject. As the poems recall the physical and emotional landscapes through which they pass, what is also being discovered and described are the paths the self must navigate toward awareness. It is not enough for Lilley to remember and describe what happened. It is also important to discover the courage and the means to let things go. Venus in Retrograde <\/em>succeeds at both tasks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Please make sure to see Susan Lilley’s poem “Wedding Season,”<\/a> included in\u00a0Venus in Retrograde<\/em> and previously published here in\u00a0Aquifer<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Susan Lilley’s poems demonstrate that “knowing” and “feeling” are not mutually exclusive methods or goals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3769,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[77,332,766,1119,1120,1121,1087,47,1122],"class_list":["post-3765","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","tag-burrow-press","tag-loss","tag-love","tag-narrative-poetry","tag-new-beginnings","tag-russ-kelser","tag-susan-lilley","tag-tony-hoagland","tag-venus-in-retrograde"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGriefs Spun to Gold - 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\/griefs-spun-to-gold\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Griefs Spun to Gold - 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