But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise

by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise emerges at a time when science is discovering more and more about the mystical particles that make up our universe and our bodies. From tidal forces and prairie burns to ruminations on racial identity while standing at the foot of Mount Rushmore, these poems chart a travelogue through mental and physical landscapes and suggest that place, time, love, and bodies are all shifts in the “undulate cosmos.” Straddling the lyrical and experimental, these poems conjure and connect the cosmological, the carnal, and the personal in a country—and a universe—that is gobbling itself into oblivion. But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise is in love with the universe of language—its forms, its sounds, and even its static.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2012

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems with lines that cause that sudden sharp intake of breath akin to the needle puncture of skin. Nestled phrase a well placed diction mine.

O thuggish awakening.
All planets but this one were named after gods

The accretion of the poems in the collection are the hand on the scale of American desires and failures. But which balance is affected?


Of what I should not touch
the universe is moving my hand closer


What is this mystery, the undefinable moment when a poet strikes a nerve - the grief biscuit that tastes different for each reader?

I know every kind
of sorry, can plot all form
of survivorship curve.

We all knew there was a storm coming. Could we have guessed it was coming from Paradise?

[David Pace]

In poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s debut collection But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), the diction is daring, the voice muscular. In “Why I Want To Be A Tow Truck Driver,” she writes,

See the snowclouds
thrusting over the range
like a cough,
a hard-packed fist? This is how
I come. Free of disguise.
Because life is hard but also crisp and literary…

In “Circles in the Sky” the throat is “my throat zone/ of avoidance buffaloing the sky above…” and crossing one of the Dakotas by automobile becomes a cosmic trip “the way cross/country/has always/been/lugnnutted/ to a wheel carto-/graphic”.

It’s rare to read poetry that is this experiential, visceral and somehow transcendent at the same time. In three sections Bertram runs her electric fingers as if over the braille of American life as varied as wildlife (coyotes, elk), the natural sciences (inter-galactic formulas, weather patterns—in both a glass globe as well as “the model solar system, [in which] planets suspend & twirl/as if from a spider’s whirl.”), as varied as “blankets sewn/with thinning economic plans and called them/shawls…” as well as the body, including in one of the more memorable poems, the laboratory heart sans blood:

[…]
Bisect the heart.

Hold each half in hand as a common coconut.
Bang it together.
Rhythm of your own choosing.

These are poems that have an urgency and lust for language, poems that feel like they’re vibrating at high speed over rumble strips on the side of the highway—poems about to go off-road. Some of them actually do, regrettably, heady innovation turned to gimmick and mimicry. (Her “Hinterland Ham Radio Signals” comes to mind.) But this is a prodigious talent to sit up and take notice of and over-reaching of this forgivable kind is inevitable.

Not only is Bertram’s language here fresh, nuanced, full of hard light but the content is expansive. Titles of the poems give you a hint of that landscape, literal as in “Giclee Self-Portrait With Mount Rushmore” to the figurative as in “Rex Mundi, or, Watching My Father Paint What He Knows of the Horizon.” References to and “glosses” on the work of other poets and writers as well as to the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter abound.

But always the images return to the concrete, blood-engorged and, at times, to the realm of social (in)justice “a car full of boys yells/nigger piglet at the girl walking home/from the late shift at taco bell….” And yet even in this poem, titled “Moon Illusion Ecologue” the harsh racism, violence–even the portentous presence of cops “in the unlit corner//of a parking lot”–the poem has a pastoral loveliness to it that belies its content: “…everything we see goldens//before we die—a perfect picture: someone’s mother,/someone’s daughter, a ruddy moon/tacked above a building necked with vines….”

Bertram is full of contradictions and confessions in But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise. The effect it has on the reader is to crane the neck for the next gem underscored as it is by the poet’s uncanny ability simultaneously to expand galactic-ally while collapsing in on neurons, the American prairie, the four chambers of an antiseptic heart.
A storm indeed.

[this review initially ran in 15 Bytes Magazine, Oct. 2013.]

[Miescha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was a great purchase since its many layers and complexities make it something I'll want to read more than once. "O thuggish awakening!" There is a true sense here of the American obsession with being "On the Road" and "Into the Wild" and yet at the same time stuck in the middle "in desperate need for desperate need." Deer in lights imgaery abound in the best possible way and leap out at frighteningly poignant moments to judge us. My favorite line: "I see the sun and the road for what they are--outbursts of slutty and grey."

[Christina Olivares · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonder of a book. Genius.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. Arsenic Lobster Poetry journal has a fantastic review: http://arseniclobster.magere.com/arch...