Fence Above the Sea

Brigitte Byrd

Reviews of the book

 

“Byrd brilliantly portrays the artist seeking out memory and making a language of it, making a pattern and narrative of the mind’s accumulations.” —from the review by Alexis Smith in Tarpaulin Sky. (Read the entire review here.)

 

“Today it often seems that a poem is a poem is a poem. Not so this haunting and hypnotic paean to loss, displacement, and the journey to self . . . . this poet’s rhythms and use of repetition echo the seminal language work of Gertrude Stein, as well as James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness monologues.” —from the review by Erica Wright in ForeWord. (Read the entire review here.)

 

“In fact, it is because of their resistance to conclusions, finally, that the prose poems especially do so well. . . . Byrd’s prose poems instruct the reader how to read them: not far into the book, we realize that her sentences challenge the logic of the sentence as a unit of speech. For instance, the first poem of the collection begins with the lines, ‘The father is a breath. This is not a mistake it is.’ The second sentence here seems to contain in one unit a statement and a refutation of the statement. In ‘(Cassis),’ logical statements beginning with ‘if’ are not proceeded by ‘then’ and questions do not end in question marks: ‘If I dance are you dancing. Je ne veux pas dormir. If there is a ritual is this a tongue clicking. J’ai peur de tomber dans les vaps. Is this performance when his chest fills with requiem is this body art. There is always a sister in the train.’ Byrd is not trying to create a chaos or to disorient the reader. And while the first section of her book is especially reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and To the Lighthouse, this is not so much because she is trying to emulate the internality or the unconscious but because she focuses on moments and attempts declarative statements, as well as the emergence and repetition of images in the middle of flux. There the reader can take pleasure in the loss of gravity that Byrd creates and sustains through the careful negotiation of the lyric speaker and form.”—from the review by J’Lyn Chapman in Denver Quarterly. (Read the entire review here.)

 

“[Byrd’s] sentences themselves are written in a continuous present, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, furthering the act of a transmutable discovery. ‘Comparative obscurity’ begins:

A dark day it is and it is in bed. An empty house is often a full heart when colors have left the rooms. This is what you get when the only brightness is a yellow shade. There is no one to let her in. I might be wrong. It is not uncommon that both breasts feel different. Silver is the color of water in the rain on the roofs. The only time a branch falls in my path is when the wind blows. I used to think. If there is estrangement what is the difference between speaking to the dead and speaking to the living. (16)

There is a particular logic found here that is at once playful and at once breathtakingly startling. All is new in Byrd’s language. All is up for grabs: imagery, metaphor, even meaning for “She says she read all night when she opens her eyes filled with meteors” (29). Here, the body acts as vehicle in this ravished realization that out of the vast nothingness of death—the literal death of the poet’s father and the metaphorical death of meaning—there is very real possibility. The language pushes this revelation, not to a fixed meaning, but to its own pulsing reality. —from the review by Carrie Bennett in Chattahoochee Review, Winter-Spring 2006.