Plotting Temporality

by Suzanne Roberts

Suzanne Roberts is the author of three previous books of poetry, Shameless (2007), Nothing to You (2008), and Three Hours to Burn a Poems on Travel (2011). She is also the author of a memoir, Almost 28 Days on the John Muir Trail (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and currently teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College in South Lake Tahoe, California. For more information, please visit her website at www.suzanneroberts.org

65 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Suzanne Roberts is the author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (March 2022), the award-winning travel essay collection Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award), as well as four books of poems. Named "The Next Great Travel Writer" by National Geographic's Traveler, Suzanne's work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women's Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, The Normal School, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno, teaches in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, and lives in South Lake Tahoe, California

Reviews

[Antonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Roberts's fourth poetry collection and I've read all four. Compared to the previous three, Plotting Temporality is more focused on the writer's life and family (if I can be forgiven for conflating poet and narrator), although they have certainly figured in earlier work. In this volume, we hear the voice of the same narrator, who has traveled the world and recorded her observations and reactions. She's sifted and mused and assimilated. In Plotting Temporality, we see her sharp and searching gaze turned inward.
 
Roberts is here preoccupied with topics that interest me greatly. The dead, for one—my favorite subject. Oh, how many poems have I written about them! And the body, its "invisible lexicon," and "rattletrap heart." My next favorite subject, about which I also write obsessively.

"Always the mathematics of muscle
and of tendon, the complicated flesh, each cell
a prison of regret."

". . . And the coming apart, bone
by bone—the physics of departure."

— from "Late Winter"

Another recurrent theme is gravity in all its meanings and guises — weight, seriousness, dignity, sobriety, the force that accounts for attraction between bodies – and you can take that both literally and figuratively.

Poems about endings. Poems about beginnings. Poems about waiting: for the train, for a flight, for another mammogram. Poems of loss and remembrance. Poems about the varieties of leave-takings: bodies from bodies, bodies from the world, flesh from the bone. We, and all we cherish, are here so briefly. Don't forget. Don't forget anything.

Ah, but it's not all pain and parting. There are moments of sheer exhilaration, made all the more joyous because life is so short, so precious. A joy that goes beyond words, the knowledge of

"Really being in the world,
until it cracks in the chest like a song."

Like all poets, Roberts searches for what matters and, with words and images, creates a safe harbor. As Frost so well put it: "Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world." I felt that way reading Roberts's poems. And although I love her poems on travel, this collection is my favorite.

There are some poems from this collection available online. "Shopping in Whole Foods with my Indian Mother" can be found at Connotation Press.com. (http://connotationpress.com/a-poetry-...)

And "Shark Attack" is in Terrain.org (http://www.terrain.org/poetry/23/robe...)

Three more poems from this collection ("Waiting for a Flight," "Want to Say," and "Skiing on the Anniversary of Daddy's Death") appear in the winter issue of The Wildcat Review.