The Plum-Stone Game

Kathleen Jesme

“Jesme’s third collection is a sweeping book made up of serial poems—long sequences of short, tonally related lyrics—that meditate on pastoral, aesthetic and domestic themes. The two longest series, ‘The Little Hour,’ and ‘I will not let thee go except thou bless me,’ delve deep into the sensuality of brief, everyday occurrences with a radiant clarity. The speaker of ‘In June or July’ (part of ‘The Little Hour’) could be talking about the poem’s author: ‘She uses the smallest sensual experience— / her fingers pulling apart the tiny rootlets of peat moss / and then separating the plants.’ Jesme focuses on and illuminates small experiences. Many of the poems are thick with aesthetic revelry, and while taken singly they can underwhelm, their cumulative effect can be mesmerizing. There’s attention to the power of lyrical lacunae, as in the poems of Cole Swenson and Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, but there are also traces of narrative woven throughout, most notably in the opening prose poem series ‘Lives of the Saints’: ‘I was a boy like other boys, except that I had murdered my sister. There was a lot of atonement required.’ It’s tantalizing, and shows Jesme’s gift for creating atmosphere, something she demonstrates throughout these luminous glimpses of various lives.”—Publishers Weekly

“The pineal gland is an organ in the brain said to be the seat of insight, spirit, intuition, the mystic’s ‘house of the third eye.’ Sadly it is also said to calcify over time. Various strategies are suggested to open the pineal gland, to strengthen and purify this mysterious center of the mind. . . . Nowhere have I read that poetry, either in reading, listening nor writing is a pathway to opening the pineal gland as means of spiritual purification, but surely, upon reading Kathleen Jesme’s The Plum-Stone Game, this book should be added to the list of detoxification options for promoting good psychic health. . . .

“‘Shall we examine betrayal? The small lesions on the skin that begin as ordinary . . . ’ Nothing in The Plum-Stone Game is ordinary. A reader is left to follow a pocket watch to which time will not be obedient. The hours, a relentless beauty, page after page, begin in the prose of saints, moving through sinuous lyric, cataloging the relics of a found ethnography and returning again to prose. Her movements are subtle, sparse, languid, as startling as the arrival of desert songbirds, pallid in the snow sun, those whose messages are carried alone through red hibiscus. Into the ear, the intimate distance of stars, sawdust, flecked notes.” from the review in The Burning Chair by Maureen Alsop