Eye to Eye
Eye to Eye
by Maria Terrone (Bordighera Press, $15) “Her brow-less, half-closed eyes/ are no window./ It’s her parted lips that see.”
Recently a controversy broke out in social media as to the color of a certain dress. Was it black and blue or white and gold? Dare anyone make the accusation that it was green and red? The controversy was centered on the subjectivity of perception and the degree to which we can trust our understanding of reality. In Eye to Eye, the latest collection of poems from Maria Terrone, the reader shifts through the multitudinous perspectives which make up the past and present to reveal the emotional imagery common to the human experience.
Like all gifted poets, Terrone pulls her readers to the edges of human perception to show its limitations. In “Missing the Names” the poet laments the idea that she does not know the names of the birds singing or names of the trees they are singing in. Nor does she know the names of foreign countries as revolutions enflame the globe. Amidst these conflicts “impossibly brilliant birds squawk above/ plazas and plains, the bloodied nameless.” We do not know nature and we do not know ourselves, even as we destroy each other. “From Where I Sit” brilliantly explores Hitchcockian themes as the poet observes the world outside through a single window. As she remains in this setting people “always leave the frame, entering/ a realm I can only imagine.”
There is a constant sense of movement in Terrone’s work. “Reunion” glides around a dinner table, past conversations, through youth and age, as a family breaks bread together. “Red flits/ across the road/ as if a bright thought/ could not be contained/ in the mind’s Forest Grimm” in the poem “Cardinal.” In fact, it is thoughts and memories that provide the most engaging movements in the collection. Terrone deftly captures the way the mind weaves between thoughts in poems like “Off-Season”, as the memory of her dying father is interspersed with scenes from a beach. “Anew” humbly begins with cleaning, continues with a hopeful dream about Manhattan, before finally ending on a heavenly island in the Mediterranean.
It is in her imagery that Terrone draws connections, disparate as her readers may be. We are shown “white threads rejoining the divided body” in the poem “Horsehair” in which doctors, Civil War soldiers, and the poet herself must come to terms with mortality. With lines like “black waves toss wild against the whorl” and “hours squeeze/ themselves out like a saline drip” we can feel the emotional intensity of the poet as we move through her work. Even the sparseness of an almost empty park is tense in the poem “Tableau”, as its three characters desperately avoid intimacy. In this tension we discover that, despite the limits of our perspectives, we are not alone in them.
Eye to Eye is a wonderful book and what is more, an exciting journey. The best poems are those in which Terrone lets her subconscious take over as the reader is guided through memories and dreams to the exquisite landscapes of her imagination. Despite a few cerebral jolts that interrupt this flight of the subconscious, it is a true pleasure to embark upon this journey with her. Like the character in “The Diarist”, I hope this poet keeps “writing down her life,/ snippets squeezed against/ margins, hugging the bars/ of spiral notebooks.”
Benjamin Schmitt
Benjamin Schmitt’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Hobart, Grist Journal, Two Thirds North, Matter, The Monarch Review, and elsewhere. His first book was published in 2013 by Kelsay Books. It is entitled The global conspiracy to get you in bed. He lives with his wife in Seattle where he teaches workshops to both children and adults.