The Rhythms of Grief

In a 1961 poem, “Barren Woman,” Sylvia Plath depicted an infertile woman as “empty,” lost in a “museum without statues”; two years later she imagined suicidal depression as “a dark water” in a late poem, “Sheep in Fog.” Plath exerts a strong pull on Emily Skaja’s doleful new collection, Black Lake, a narrative cycle that probes a year of miscarriages and the misery into which Skaja plunged, at the age of 40.

Other poets, too, make cameos — Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks — as Skaja holds the psychic wolves at bay, with mixed results; “the tedious heat of language” often fails her. There are also a caustic wit and a political consciousness that keep her tethered to the world rather than dissociating from it, a striking departure from the sexual heat of her previous book, Brute, winner of the American Academy of Poets’ Walt Whitman Prize.

As her fertility window begins to close, Skaja and her husband push hard to get pregnant, seeking medical intervention, yet miscarriages mount as summer slips toward autumn and then winter. She bemoans her biological clock and contrasts her condition with fecundity around her — grapes, white oaks, mushrooms, a nearby “garden shop” — an irony which feeds her despair. She lives near a mystical opaque lake, possibly a portal to the other side; she mulls what would happen if she dives in and never surfaces, literally drowning her sorrows. Skaja balances her confessional mode with acerbic observations on Trump and her Tennessee neighbors, “real southern lady shit.” Often she sounds like an op-ed columnist, and that’s a good thing in Dark Lake. She mocks her “Schrödinger’s womb,” reminding us that grief has its own rhythms and tonal register.  

Skaja addresses poems to her spouse and mother but then turns inward, a rush of self-loathing: “The sheet is ripped away & I’m revealed to be the ruin I always was.” Although she’s telling a story, sticking to a plot, she occasionally bursts into lyricism, letting imagery guide her. She invokes Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck,” for example, as she descends a ladder, “clutching/the gluey rungs of a throat.” In another Plathian echo, the poet sneers at her rituals of normalcy: “I want nothing / to do with that other self, walking / her spiral of mud.” And like Plath in Ariel, she favors enjambed lines, her quest for a child open-ended.

A beautiful sestina, “The Door,” suggests even the rigors of form can’t act as a safety net against the gravity of her infertility. Poetry is just another flawed means to contemplate her pain. An exquisite corpse, a kind of verbal collage, emerges as an “exquisite skeleton.” She compares herself to Emerson’s transparent eyeball. In “It’s the stage of grief where [I become attached to a loaf of bread],” Skaja lifts an image from “You’re,” Plath’s iconic poem on pregnancy, and cleverly transforms it into a mini-horror film as the speaker swaddles a “little loaf” like an infant, “Baby Pumpernickel,” taking it to Mommy & Me swim classes.

A long prose poem, “It’s the stage of grief where [I become estranged from myself],” almost flash fiction, features a divided self in lachrymose conversation, reminiscent of Yeats’ “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” and ends with an epiphany as she drives along the lake: “the light begins to fade, I see now where shoreline becomes shallows, where the road becomes the night. I make my hand into a bird that flies out the window, buffeted by wind.”

She’s on the edge.

Yet spring arrives: “Bees roll around drunk in the hellebore / peonies charge up out of the ground.” She finds resolution, or at least a détente in the war with her body. As another poet once claimed, hope springs eternal. Skaja’s acknowledgments gesture toward a happy surprise, “the brightest star in the firmament.” Although transposed to a minor key, Black Lake moves with the urgency of Brute, laying bare this writer’s vulnerabilities.