Goodmorning
Menagerie, 2020
In a ringing, Melanie Noel
takes readers on a delightfully wonderlandish journey through forests and paths
and meadows. Reading the poems in this chapbook, readers find ourselves enticed
and encircled by trees, ghosts, leaves, animals, and insects; we watch as “ants
intravenously paced the pines” and “pines intravenously paced the sky”. The strange
and natural world as presented in a ringing is full of doubling,
transformative movement. “Today / the cicadas are chainmail hammocks swinging
in the chainmail day” and a “dying leaf becomes // a yellow petal.” We
experience “A mineral silence then a
lemon silence.”
The world of a ringing is
encompassing and inescapable. “A leaf follows me,” Noel writes, “Don’t
follow me leaf, I say, / I have vertigo but it trots after me like a
disobedient dog.” As we take in the sensory details Noel plies us with, we find
ourselves also a part of her anthropomorphized and attentive universe. Happily,
Noel’s world is more curious than dangerous, and readers are guided through the
narrator’s perspective: “I seduced the mosquitoes and saw things I hadn’t seen.
// They let me try to be like them, the trees.” The narrator continually asserts
agency through phrases like “I seduced,” “I trespassed,” “I saw,” “I complain,”
“I remember,” “I love,” or “I ask.” Our guide rarely subverts the self to the
world; when “I” is not directing lyric action, she illustrates the often-surreal
movements of flora or fauna surrounding the narrator’s body: “The horse
chestnut and I are flocked with flies,” Noel writes; “geraniums the color of
commercial valentines spit me out.”
Noel’s chapbook is divided into two
sections, beginning with the longer “Outer Ray” and ending with “Inner Ray.”
“Outer Ray” explores the fantasy-woodland through themes of walking, being in
nature, and seeking and exploring. “Inner Ray” is more concerned with the
interior of the self. Generally, “Inner Ray” offers “damp introspection” more
than worldly observation. Throughout a ringing, poems may be formed in
couplets or tercets, but most often they range over the page in multi-spaced
and often end-stopped lines. Sometimes the poems are titled, but not always. Ends
of poems or units of longer poems are frequently marked with an ant-shaped
vertical ornament. It can be a little difficult for readers to track beginnings
and endings, and ultimately it makes more comforting sense to consider the
chapbook in its entirety as a unit, rather than individual poems or sections.
The
poems throughout a ringing invite readers to listen for sounds and
resonances, and to seek echoes that are visual and spatial, as well as sonic. As
we move through Noel’s enchanting “lampshop of blossoms” in a sort of dreamlike
travelogue, we feel “the woman’s eye grab the walnut, and then as her eye had,
her hand.” We trace the trees and the grasses to find, along with the narrator,
that “The mountains were not the mountains or were not the mountains only.” Overall,
Noel’s chapbook is lovely and weird in all the best ways. a ringing
encourages readers to notice relationships between self and space and world, it
provokes us to make observations that are keener and livelier, and it requests
that we participate more actively in our surroundings. We may enter the forest,
but when we do we must enter it wholly. Noel reminds us, “The forest says, don’t
make too much of it but I do.”
