The Edge of Breath

In her new poetry collection Winter Sharp with Apples, Annette Sisson centers the ordinary joys and sorrows of life. It’s a monumental task to record dailiness, those stretches of time that might be unremarkable if not for somebody gesturing toward them, making us look. And Sisson does so with a sharp eye, never missing a detail.

In “Flight Season,” the speaker embodies an in-between space, caring for a grandchild in one section and an elderly parent in another. She describes helping the toddler bathe and watching the father wither. The poem ends with an image: “Across my cornea, blackbirds / flit like specks of cobweb, / dart away when I focus.” In this rendering, the birds become a symbol of living and dying at once, a reminder that we only get so much time here on Earth. There’s something quietly revolutionary about Sisson’s work offering us a full view of oft-neglected years.

The blackbirds are not the only symbol in Winter Sharp with Apples encompassing both life and death. In the opening poem “Origin Story,” Sisson casts the moon in this role:

kernel of being // seed of death —

twin chambers of a cracked walnut, a pair

of fibrous lungs teetering on the edge of breath.

This notion of twinned halves haunts the entire collection. It is what Frank Bidart might call Sisson’s “radical given,” the subject she can’t escape.

Winter Sharp with Apples presents multiple generations from the perspective of a poet in the middle. In “Daughter, Driving at Night,” she captures the psychic threads that might bind people together. A mother jolts out of bed, knowing before the phone rings that something is wrong. This uncanny experience feels impossible, and yet such connections are frequently reported. There’s nothing supernatural about how love makes the impossible possible. In fact, Sisson seems to say, what could be more natural?

These poems posit that knowing where we come from and where we’re going is the only way to make sense of our lives. In “Her Offering,” the speaker’s mother creates a list of marriageable partners for her husband to consider after she dies. Sisson writes that the dying spouse “fashioned him a sequel.” This small, memorable act of generosity takes years for the speaker to untangle. Sisson is a patient poet.

In “First Coffee,” a woman makes coffee on her 66th birthday as her six-month-old grandson entertains himself at her feet. She contemplates his future as well as her own, wonders when her own body will betray her. It’s a peaceful but poignant poem that gets to the heart of this collection’s concerns. How do we appreciate the quotidian moments with death’s ever-present breath surrounding us? In response, Sisson offers her readers tiny miracles and miseries, making us notice them. Her poem “On the Brink” addresses someone who’s committed suicide and tries to make sense of this final act. “What ghost broke you? How // did the brain unfasten?” she asks. The stanza break after “How” is telling. It creates a pause as if that is the complete question: How?

Sisson’s first full-length collection, Small Fish in High Branches, was published in 2022. She is an English professor at Belmont University and lives in Nashville. Images plucked from Southern landscapes weave throughout Winter Sharp with Apples. The book title comes from the poem “Caney Fork,” which Tennessee readers will know as a tributary of the Cumberland River. The speaker and her partner visit an orchard, relieved that the familiar face of an old woman greets them, that — to put it bluntly — she hasn’t died yet. The poem ends with a vision of that same woman, “the sleeves of her blowsy jacket fanning / wind, a winter sharp with apples.” That is, fruit and frost, living and dying at once. Ultimately, Sisson is a philosophical poet, imbuing stories and objects plucked from everyday life with the dignity they deserve.

Tagged: Book Reviews, Poetry