When i am dead my darling full#
In “Rebirth” she comes back as a bird in “West,” Cundieff writes: “this time I am dead, I died a year ago, and it’s only my afterimage/ positioned in the passenger seat.” As befitting those titles, the poems are also full of stark wisdom, like “The risk of remembering is guilt, my friends” and “The headstone names around us/ fooled you into thinking we weren’t so/ dangerously alone.” As in the Grimms’ fairy tales, there is reality in the fantastic, and there is rawness and ugliness in magic. The speaker is a conjuror, a witch, an oracle, a mystic, and a priestess. On the shelves of these poems are the shards, bits, blood, and relics that power priests, fairies, and physicists alike. Cundieff has a talent for characterization that neither sugars nor salts, letting complex relationships shine. As with any good fairy tale or myth or life, these poems are haunted: a lost pregnancy, her father’s life and death, the father’s childhood friend who abused animals, a drowned Syrian refugee toddler, a lightning-struck all-American football player, and a friend who died by suicide. There are ways of losing and of grieving that English does not have words for, ways that it cannot bear in its abstract words of emotion-sadness, pain, indifference, grief, ambivalence, relief-but Cundieff can say with worms, matroska, cigarettes, and a dead darling “like a boy and his roan horse// off to split the warm wind/ with their teeth and chess, wet and white/ below the sun’s burst fist.”ĭarling Nova’s cast of characters includes a freak, mystics, lost kings, sluts, death, imperfect mothers, God, oddballs, weirdos, poor lovers, the bogeyman, eccentrics, villains, and witches.
When i am dead my darling windows#
Darling Nova graphs the calculus of humans to each other, the animal, and spiritual worlds with the likes of apogee, perigee, the modern curse of radiation in “The Conqueror, 1956,” and the title “Coefficient of Restitution.”Ĭundieff’s linguistic calculations are as precise and powerful as the unexplainable forces of god, bardo, and magic “gymnasium carnations burning/ our wrists down to desire” characterize adolescence in “Roll Call (2),” and “its cancer of windows flush against lace” in “Half-life” lets our society speak its own volumes about how we shun members with mental health issues. The collection draws on references to indie singer Joanna Newsom, ‘50s film flop “The Conqueror,” critic and philosopher of language and society George Steiner, activist and mystic Simone Weil, and writer-turned-musician Leonard Cohen.
In blistering moments of clarity on the past, future, and human nature, Cundieff commands physics, religion, folk art, philosophers, and psychology.
The opening poem rings to a close: “ Reminiscence is an augury/ backwards, a slow bullet returning to us, now.” the speaker’s implication in the humanness of trauma and the ways we wound one another makes her a credible critic of interpersonal dynamics and gives her prophetic moments credence. From betraying her child by slapping away his hand in “Snakes” at the beginning of the collection to the bogeyman who she confesses everything to in “Bird of Paradise” near the end. The speaker is never defensive she never hides her own flaws, mistakes, or sins. The poems readily reveal bleakness and bad judgments, from friends’ mistakes to the speaker’s own. She died badly, her mother/ embarrassed and hiding the cause.” Hepatitis worsened by alcohol. With the first poem, “Who Now to Rebel Against,” Cundieff dispenses with shame and its silent ravages: “I’m driving away from a childhood/ friends’ funeral. Through regret and desire, love and haunting, and against a complex, hyper, pain-inducing world, Darling Nova asks: “ do we not all have// some place more human to go?” The collection encompasses from the micro level of person-to-person relationships to the macro levels of interstellar physics, sociology, and spirituality. From the very title onwards, intimate affections and expansive worldviews coincide in Melissa Cundieff’s debut collection Darling Nova (Autumn House Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Autumn House Poetry Prize.
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