Confluence

by Sandra Marchetti

“Comfort is when / you are tethered / to a place / you couldn't move / fast from anyway,” Sandy Marchetti writes in Confluence, and we can take deep comfort in her lovely and loving tetherings to place, both pastoral and domestic, where "What's young / comes lick-swift” and one's beloved is always nearby to “delight in,” to make one's “skin a new bird, white in the morning-bright and newly downy.” What a shining debut.
–Jason Koo, author of America’s Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island

Genres: Poetry

71 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2015

About the author

Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications. Eating Dog Press also published an illustrated edition of her essays and poetry, A Detail in the Landscape, and her first volume, The Canopy, won Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Chapbook Contest. Sandy won Second Prize in Prick of the Spindle’s 2014 Poetry Open and was a finalist for Gulf Coast’s Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose appears in Blackbird, The Journal, Subtropics, The Hollins Critic, Sugar House Review, Mid-American Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, South Dakota Review, Appalachian Heritage, Southwest Review, Phoebe, and elsewhere. Sandy is a teacher and freelance manuscript editor who lives and writes outside of Chicago.

Reviews

[Sharon Huether · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this FREE book throught Goodreads-First reads. A wonderful little book of poems. I really liked how the author used many nature themes in her poems. The memories of the old neighborhood really spoke to me. Nothing remains the same.

[McKenzie Tozan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I find myself thinking so much about what poetry is or what it can do that I forget to think about how it can make me feel. Perhaps that is the sign of a lesser poetry, a poetry with holes in it: one that goes through the motions, the mechanics, of writing, but drives forward without an emotional core. The best poetry, though, leaves me feeling a little raw, a little open, a little more real. And sometimes that feeling comes by way of sadness or joy, but sometimes it is at its most memorable when it comes by way of awareness: awareness of the mind, of nature, and of the body. This is where Sandra Marchetti’s collection, Confluence, leaves me: with an awareness of the body, a clarity of mind, a reconnecting to nature. Marchetti’s poetry demands it, and hers is a poetry that leaves me happy to oblige.

To start us off, I’m going to include three of my favorite poems from this collection, to share and discuss:



THE LANGUAGE OF ICE



Crowns of birds emerge and sink,
skid to the river in blinking beats.
Jagged as glass, ice flashes match
memories of church windows, a glacial past.
Lines of a pencil afloat mark a bobbing post,
bags beneath drift, seek their currents like fish.

Twist—the tree calls us to see roots straight to meet
concrete then broke above like floes pulled up;
a stretching shrine, bark chases the water’s
spine—a blind grasp toward glinting.

Branches reach behind their back,
trill the stream to sing
a glad racket of sounds that smack
of crowning winter’s gleam.



SKYWARD



The moon resolves
to a crescent of sparrows;

their cloud snags
the telephone poles.

Beaks pass
the car’s roof,

become a lone
jet headed west,

a transformation of loft.

The birds disappear—
they were never here—

a bait and switch
after which I point.



MIGRATION THEORY



The womb a tent,
lit from within, flutters
golden on the wind.

I’m given to pregnancy
dreams again.

Sleeping, the world becomes round once more—
sleeping atop my midriff. Sleeping in
silence and veins and skin—a globe, a missive.

I’m told the child
is ghost; instead

the sleep is lifted into,
alight with curiosities
curling out from the hand.

Sleep. The light sheet ruffles within.
White moths in flight
lift from the body—the skin.



Two of the three poems I have included here involve birds, and obviously not all of Marchetti’s poems do—but it’s the beauty, the migratory patterns, and the mindfulness that Marchetti instills in and observes in these birds that teaches me so much about this world she’s created through these poems. What I love so much about this collection is its involvement in what was and what could be: old and classic traditions of poetry and poetic form, where Marchetti grew up, and that age-old idea that we can never go home again, unchanged or without consequence. This concept continues to be of great interest to us, because at some point, we always have to leave something we are connected to—home, a relationship, a workplace, a tree pulled up at the root—and we desire to return to that thing we’ve left. Even the concept of migration is not immune to this: though these birds may fly out and reappear in the same place, these occurrences are months apart, and things will have changed—something as large as the changing of the landscape, a building constructed, or something as small as an onlooker who observes the sky at once full and empty of birds. This concept of mortality of place is a recurring one in Marchetti’s work, and it is handled well—so well, in fact, that despite its darker truths, I am comforted in the knowledge that I can relate.

And perhaps why this is all at once such an appealing and vexing concept is because of how Marchetti portrays her personal investments, and reminds us of our own. Through our connections to nature, where we grew up, and our loved ones (and even entertainment venues, like a favorite movie theater or ball park), we grow invested, which means we inevitably have something we could lose, or one day have to leave behind. These poems are aware of the body and nature, and recall the domestic and the pastoral we observe in the classics. These connections to the past leave us feeling nostalgic and lead us to think about those things specific to our lives that keep us nostalgic, that make us call into our own pasts for the things we lost or had to leave behind.

These concepts of leaving and missing home or a relationship or a place are hardly new, and many of us experience these phenomena often. However, these themes continue to work in Marchetti’s poems because of her employment of the writing as a reflection of the emotional core. By writing about past memories and places, we are encouraged to think of our own memories; and by using forms reminiscent of formal poetry, we are encouraged to think of where we have been as a larger (literary) community. And perhaps this is only me, but the involvement of these forms, or echoes of forms, make these memories all the more resonant. Perhaps it is the way that sound and rhythm impact us: the sounds in these poems, and their rhythms, lead us to read these poems at varied paces, cause us to pause, challenge us to hold our breath, take a breath; and this kinesthetic relationship impacts us emotionally. Reading “The Language of Ice” with its rhythm that is almost observant of rap, excites me, and makes me think of the choppy, sharp edges of ice; while reading a poem like “Skyward,” with its recurring s-sounds, makes me read the poem more slowly, making me think of the slow and easy passage of birds across an icy surface, across the sky, and their slow disappearance, so slow sometimes that I begin to question if they really were there at all.

Sandra Marchetti has produced a really beautiful, and careful, collection that observes beauty, nature, and the body in a way that is thorough, alert, but unapologetic, honest and open. This is a strong deviation away from the old forms that I really admire: her ability to invite the sexual, entertainment, and pop culture, into her poems, while still employing careful images, rhythms, and sounds (as well as some internal and end-rhymes). If you haven’t already rushed out to read this collection, find the time to slow down and read this one, and give yourself the time to read it slowly. The images and the line-work deserve it.

[Ace Boggess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Confluence, I encountered something I didn't expect (in fact, rarely see in a book of poems): the writer's sense of joy. Poets often capture this feeling for a poem or two, but it seldom lasts longer than that and almost never for the length of an entire collection. These short, bright poems cover subjects ranging from sensuality to ornithology, and always with that pure delight as though the poet/narrator has written them in a frenzy of happiness. Because of that, I couldn't put the book down. The poet channeled this feeling through poem after poem, allowing the book to build in unanticipated intensity. I found myself happier as I read, and so kept going. Good stuff.

[Molly]

Marchetti has some lovely turns of phrase; we're never bored with syntax in her observations, nor detail. This is lovely cover, too, with so much darkness and the peony-like roses, my favorite; spilling into the back, a lone ant.

[Catherine Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Review:

http://prickofthespindle.org/2015/08/...

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4

[Kat Dixon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very floral. Favorites include "The East Highlands," "Migration Theory," "Hollow," "The Curve," and "One Secret."

[Marne Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you buy books based solely on the cover art, sometimes you're going to find one you just don't connect with. I took several stabs at this one on different days, and while I appreciated many of the nature images within the poems, they just didn't do much for me as a whole. I'm sorry, Confluence. It's not you; it's me.

[Angele · Rating 4 out of 5]

[This review first appeared on the blog of Weave Magazine.]

Pictures at an Exhibition: A Review of Sandra Marchetti’s Confluence by Angele Ellis

Confluence by Sandra Marchetti
Sundress Publications (2015)

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Reading Sandra Marchetti’s first full-length book of poetry is like being immersed in a series of works in an art gallery. Each scene of unfolding—in rich brushstrokes of language—pulls the viewer/reader in, and doesn’t quite let go. Like paintings, Marchetti’s mostly brief but lush lines convey both miracles of beauty and intimations of strain and mortality. (Confluence’s cover is a detail from early 18th century Dutch painter Jan van Huysum, in which a rose and peony are captured on the cusp of over-ripeness, and a zinnia’s stem already has fallen.)

This artist’s view of the world is made explicit in some of Marchetti’s poems. In “Saints,” the poet’s eye glides from the “stars” of the Virgin of Guadalupe to an evocation of the techniques of such classic Dutch painters as van Huysum, as in these lines:

…They say
a glass of water
is the very hardest thing…

…The Dutch could do this—
hold water in their eyes—
inside the painter

a glass would become full,
a flower fresh
with drops of dew,
insects on the petals.

And “Sur l’herbe” is a direct allusion to 19th century painter Édouard Manet’s erotic shocker “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.” Addressing a lover, perhaps, the poem’s speaker directs her own scene like a master:

…Don’t move:
you can’t see
you are a strange
portrait.

Like Manet,
I strain each stroke
of cup and nape
to show I can…

These excerpts demonstrate Marchetti’s command of not only the images but also the music of poetry—including alliteration, enjambment, rhyme and near rhyme, and the punch of the spondee (a metrical foot in which both syllables are stressed—DUM-DUM—as in “Don’t move”). Marchetti is frank about her poetic influences and the ways in which they haunt her work. This is particularly evident in this passage from her essay “Rhyming with the Dead” (The Turnip Trucks, 1-28-2016):

… My influences include the confessionals, Bishop, Hopkins, Dickinson, and others. I have done it both intentionally and unintentionally; indeed, this is very common in contemporary poetry… I have found all of my poems are part of this interconnected web and that is why certain lines ring in my head—they are not wholly mine; they chime with other voices. In short, I rhyme with the dead.

Later in this essay, Marchetti compares her poem “Lunch” to Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” a mid-20th century classic that Marchetti has learned by heart. She reflects:

…When Sexton says “June” on the Poetry Speaks recording, she gives such weight to word. I remember my initial reaction to its heavy vowel jab. I have never forgotten it. “Lunch,” another poem of mine, incorporates the same syntactical maneuver of Sexton’s “It is June…” line. The second stanza of “Lunch” reads:

Sorting the demands of red-orange,
pink, cream, I flick stems on the bank,
watch them wash downstream. It is noon,
the bees are circling for somewhere to land.

(Marchetti, “Rhyming with the Dead.”)

Nourishment, sex, art—and the ultimate inability of these things to hold back destruction—make every object in Confluence (animal, vegetable, mineral, the very landscape) a precious yet vulnerable body. In “Orange Bouquet,” one garden-harvested cauliflower encompasses a world of meaning, from “loos[ing]” to “snap,” as in these lines:

… The dark farm in diorama
crams between each branch.

I brush caterpillars into the sink
and geese wink out, smatter

dirt on my hands
in their landing.

Again and again in Confluence, the speaker uses smooth and sharp turns of language to meld with her subject. In “Borderland,” an ordinary fenced-in swimming pool becomes the center of a mystery, with something “… gnawing at your waters.” When the poet asks the pool “What are you?” the answer is “A country.”

The word that provides Marchetti with this book’s title, confluence, has multiple meanings. Literally the merging of two bodies of water (as Pittsburgh’s Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers merge to form the Ohio River), it is figuratively any coming together—of factors, ideas, cultures, beings. At the point of confluence, something is both lost and gained. The book’s final poem, “One Secret” (perhaps echoing Elizabeth’s Bishop’s “One Art”), is both a love poem and an artistic credo. In the last lines of this poem, the speaker’s consciousness expands to embrace her lover’s body in the present, its inevitable demise, and the “rhythms” that define her art and world:

… Dusk flares the bones’ groan, so I rub your stomach
until you sleep. I neat my breath to yours,
as if you were a child; the confluence
of rhythms begins. It is only sound
and meaning. Sound and meaning.