Yield,
Lydia Unsworth
Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2020
I read the first sentence and I put down the book. That’s it. That just now, it can’t be topped. What more could there be. I have too much exuberance, energy, there’s too much happening. I won’t reproduce it here. And the whole book is like that – there are lines of innumerable prowesses:
“Take me to a
field of weeds so that I, too, can untether.” (11)
“The threat of
anything but us trying to take back land.” (15)
“I was a whole
thing in the blanket—sharing this, shaking something, going limp and then slowly
stirring up a life.” (18)
“And a fantastic
range of fragrances swallowed the social animal whole.” (23)
“We float, we know
we float, I have dropped goods into the wetness and witnessed.” (30)
There’s so much movement in each poem: a lateral shift, sometimes extremely aware of its silliness, sometimes awestrikingly agile. Not everything is connected, but everything does move into everything else. There are stanzas that neither end nor begin and have nothing to do with one another (“Beget Each Other”), although elsewhere there is simply a pause for resolve, the space breaking up stanzas like nesting parentheses do in yet other poems. There are uncertainties in the status of words because of their destination (is the quiet in the title “Quiet Ambition and Strengthen Spine” a verb or an adjective?). Motives, images accompany this movement. Sometimes it’s even described: crawled, crept through, corkscrewed, a sine wave - and later, “we move, we yield” (13). Or analysed: “you can’t say any single motion was either fated or natural.” (20) Evaluated: “What is mine is yours: duplicitous relay.” (33) Lots of things are dropped, being dropped.
Even the movement in rhythm that’s proper to poetry is transfigured, tearing at the prose poem (the last poem, the only one in verse, showing the arbitrariness of prose), while images slide into one another, attention slipping between textures and senses:
With one hand in
your mouth / and your finger in your eye / you soften the glare of the spilled
cocktails on the boulevard tiles / You soften the words lining your tongue
before flapping them out on the cool post-puddles. (12)
The poem “(Grasp at) Externals /” incarnates the spirit of the book: brief, complete images in a succession guided by internal meaning, out of their own implications, as if they weren’t even written. Drab and vivid colours, living and killing elements, imperatives that are little more than suggestions, a speaker who interjects – all this tied together as it would be in perception, when we just let ourselves be, when the world happens to us. A meditation without calm. The tension between movement and stillness in a “sun-roofed sinkhole” (again, put down the book, there’s nothing else possible now).
Reading back through the book, I realize I’ve focused on the movement within sentences, between them, on this sense of being carried, swung really and then thrown into another sentence, into another poem’s arms. Like “virtually every object in the sky has more than one designation,” (14) the objects in these poems seem to reappear under different guises, they shift even within a poem (“and those vests and knickers would just become another Wikipedia page,” 26), and I’m led to see the gaps and the transitions that fill them instead of anything that resembles meaning. There is the land that keeps coming back as a word, but then again not as a stable thing.
It’s not that these poems are moving – the sort of thing you would say that leaves no room for further conversation, that leaves no room for this humour, these smirks, this knowing unknowingness. It’s that they are ready to carry something. Like everything in that beautiful adverb, “alonely,” a metamorphosis that happens only once and doesn’t need a balance point, an end point. Balancing is, of course, a way to move – “Caught between doing and undoing, resting between sentences like being too scared to enter a room.” (23)
