Captivity

by Laurie Sheck

I feel a pleasure of never contained sweep over me, now that I know place is never
Clear or wholly settled, not even the veins on the underside of a leaf, its freedoms.

At once tender and fierce, concise and associative, Laurie Sheck’s Captivity charts and explores the textures and movements of mind in her gorgeous, long-lined poetry. Placed at intervals throughout the book are poems the author calls “Removes,” which take their initial impulse from American captivity narratives and constitute a profoundly felt inquiry into what is familiar and what is strange, what it means to be displaced and radically apart, and how disruption itself becomes its own kind of opportunity. The poems describe a psychic territory both desolate and exultant, as Sheck embraces the fragmentary, yet stays alert to what remains “mysteriously standing.” She writes, “Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the break and fled of things inside it. ” In Captivity , Sheck illuminates this shadow-thought world that governs what we are and attains provocative glimpses of the fluid self.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Matthew Hittinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheck's trademark long lines are here but in poems of much shorter length in an odd-book size (square) that respects the long width of the line but the shorter length of the poem, which is refreshing after the dense poem lengths of The Willow Grove and Black Series (which also suffered from font and spacing that were perhaps too small and condensed).

These poems investigate a state of mind (captivity) more than anything, the mind at work, the mind reflecting upon itself, and the mind in relation to the skin that encases it. It's not a simple mind-body dichotomy at play, though. It's the act of thinking on the page that is most captivating, in language that is at once eloquent and varied in its rhythms that I found myself reading out loud as if under a spell.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. Frost, then ridged snow.
     The body can't rest when it's in pain. Outside: hills closed as the cells' glass secrecies, 
Waste spaces etched and fissured with genetic script. (The mind would pierce them)
2.  Extremity/Planting itself in me until I am most Northerly and lost--all tundra-cold whiteness and mistrust.
Winter-taught, ignorant, unsolved. (The Second Remove)
3. December night. The north winds shift above the icy hill; (Hidden liberty)
4. How alien, how chilling, this austere and fierce machinery of thinking. (This austere and fierce machinery)
5. In the poem Genome, Sheck uses brackets in partial lines to suggest the effect of poetry translated from ancient mss. that are missing words, lines, or phrases do to damage. Sheck credits Guy Davenport's translation of Sappho fragment 24.

[            ]
[   ] that labor [     ]
[   ] to sing [        ]
[       ] a storm wind [       ] 
[     ] and no pain [      ]
 What survives is mutilated, torn--on scraps of papyrus/
     Used to mummify crocodiles, on pottery shards...

6.  Thinking is a truceless act. (Comfort binds itself)
7. There are so many thresholds in the body.
     The cells in their distant otherness inside me.( The cells in their distant otherness)
8.      How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
9. And now this January whiteness destroys the covered-over of itself. (So many bending threads)
10. In so biting a cold, the Norths in me hardening, sun stripped of crown. (The Thirteenth Remove)


The purpose in collecting these notes was to try and get a grasp of some imagery that seems to be common between these poems and Sheck's novel "A Monster's Notes". Specifically, she uses a lot of images of cold, piercing cold, the North, frozen wastes, etc. 

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty amazing stuff here. There are very few volumes of poetry that I am compelled to read straight through (I usually open them randomly and skip around) but Laurie Sheck's Captivity really does have a nearly narrative thread. Her "long-lined" poems dance on the edge of the hallucinatory at times, are filled with word play and wonder and wandering. She uses words we may normally consider non-emotive in ways that fill us with dread, loss, loneliness and vague imaginings. I picked this up at the local library on a whim, but will be ordering a copy for my permament bookshelf. "...one holds within oneself a guardedness, expectant, deeply quarried..." p. 44 (this bright unswaying place) "Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the break and fled of things inside it,..." p. 6 (a quiet skin)"Skin has no choice but to converse with the world." p. 56 (But there's another leaf)"The seconds slant and coarse with with split-asunder." p. 4 (No hour) I've been schooled lately in the power of concrete imagistic poetry, (show don't tell), but Sheck's poetry has a naturalness to me, a harking back to a stream-of-consciousness style that has always intrigued me. A psychicly and rythmicly freer line such as found in Lorsung's "Music to Land Planes By".

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

No Hour

White sky and such intervals of quiet.
   How even the most still-seeming thing rushes through itself and isn’t final.
Particles. Waves. Nor can I compute the possible.
   In my most careful calculations, I am the automaton holding out her bells,
Raising and lowering her fists to a measured, steady ticking. But there is a cast-apart
   In me that marks no hour, and its hands hold no bells at all,

The seconds slant and coarse with split-asunder.




A Quiet Skin

Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the break and fled of things inside it,
   Blue hills most gentle in calm light, then stretches of assail
And ransack. Such tangles of charred wreckage, shrapnel-bits
   Singling and singeing where they fall. I feel the stumbling gait of what I am,
The quiet uproar of undone, how to be hidden is a tempting, violent thing—
   Each thought breaking always in another,

All the unlawful elsewheres rushing in.




The Mind Would Pierce Them

Frost, then ridged snow.
   The body can’t rest when it’s in pain. Outside: hills closed as the cells’ glass secrecies,
Waste spaces etched and fissured with genetic script.
   Why should their meanings be clear? Such bold disconsolates
In them, and the tendings, the dividings. The mind would pierce them,
   Being scared. Now on my arm, chopped angled shadows;
And how they enter the eye with their sense of breakage, their sense of outlaw

And estrange.

*

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fine. I picked it up on a recommendation from a friend. There are some lines in this collection that stick out to me and I jotted down because I liked how they sounded when spoken aloud.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long lines that nicely link together.

[Carrie · Rating 1 out of 5]

weak I liked Black Series so much more.

[Alana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Complex, dense, lovely poems despite their brevity - a hard go, for me, but worthwhile.