Shipbreaking

by Robin Beth Schaer

Honored as one of BuzzFeed's "16 Best Poetry Books of 2015"
Honored as one of BuzzFeed's "24 Best Literary Debuts of 2015" 

Robin Beth Schaer's debut collection of poetry,  Shipbreaking, charts a beautiful and dangerous journey. It is an intimate and interstellar odyssey where seas rise, mastodons roam, aeronauts float overhead, bodies electrify, and a child is born as a ship wrecks in a hurricane. The speaker here is curious and fierce, consulting scientists, philosophers, ancient maps, fossil bones, and lovers in order to survive and understand the strange majesty of living. With empathy and exaltation, the poems collapse the distance between natural disasters and human struggles, interweaving relationships between the upheavals and renewals that both the heart and Earth undergo.

From "Disturbance"

Put a silver coin on your tongue
with a penny underneath
and you can taste the electricity.

We said go slow but were urgent
as elephants, charging down
the power lines. Now the lights 

won't stay on and the trees
are down. Sleep until you're done,
I'm awake, brushing hands along

darkened walls, feeling for the switch.
It must be here somewhere. We are
electric; this is not a metaphor ...

Genres: Poetry, Adult

76 pages, Paperback

First published August 20, 2015

About the author

Robin Beth Schaer is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collection Shipbreaking and a work in progress on art and atrocity. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Paris Review, and Guernica, among others. Her recent awards include the Creative Capital Award Shortlist in 2022, a Fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts in 2021, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020, and artist residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Djerassi. She has taught writing in New York, New Jersey, and Ohio, and she worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a 180-foot ship lost in Hurricane Sandy.

Reviews

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the great powers of poetry is its ability to instill and convey wonder. Schaer's keen, sleek lines cut right to the heart of things, like Basho's idea of slicing into a ripe melon, quick and certain:

For your birthday, a party

without you here: spongecake
and cherryade. Hope you were

given bread and molasses.
My love, remember, the polestar

is not alone, but twinned,
a pair of suns, guiding you North.

("At Home")

Sea-themed, but not strictly so, the book has a nautical mind, cutting gracefully back and forth across a surface of charged particles.


We said to stay. We said to sail.
She was safer at sea. We were not

safe at sea. Straight out and down.
South by east. South by west.

("Shipbroken")

Wherever she sails, there are mystical creatures, coveys of waves, wild ginger, steeples tipped in copper. In short, there are miraculously seen and inhabited worlds.

This is not a masters' thesis turned into a book. Rather, it is an evolution of mind, body and art into one sustaining vision, deep and alive. Highly recommended!

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

At Home

The copper carries my wishes.
A storm snapped a dozen trees
the week you left; the same
straight firs cut for masts.
The gazette held no word,
no sight of your sails. Each week,
my fingers traced columns of ships—
Flying Cloud, Lion of Waves,
Golden Empire—with titles
broader than their beams,
bold as thoroughbreds, as if
a name could seal a fortune.
My mind slipped to the ocean
floor, littered with wrecks.
I placed silver coins
beside your picture and knit
scarves until we received
the rattle and whalebone
swallows. I send you handshakes
in return. Our son was born
this winter: eight pounds
and eager thirst, no fever.
It was three days of labor
with compress of nettle
and yarrow leaf, every knot
in the house untied. His ears
are tiny shells, hands in fists,
your brown hair. The cradle
is drawn with yellow dories.
For your birthday, a party
without you here: spongecake
and cherryade. Hope you were
given bread and molasses.
My love, remember, the polestar
is not alone, but twinned,
a pair of suns, guiding you North.

If you want to hear her read it:
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/wp-conte...

Here is her webpage with an interview with her and other poems you can read from this collection:

http://www.robinbethschaer.com/writing

Sherer worked as a deck-hand on the Tall Ship Bounty, a 180-foot fully-rigged ship lost in Hurricane Sandy. She writes about boats, the sea, but also this idea of “shipbreaking” in other aspects of her life. Her fears for her son’s future on this planet. The collection holds together with water and sea breezes and "she was safer at sea."

Here’s one more, for your pleasure. This is her debut collection, which feels urgent, soaring, erudite, hopeful, lovely: “that skyward longing, to be untethered.”

Nomad

In a time of faint beasts, no room
is left in the boats. With thin hands,
we huddle sheep and dip a hundred
reeds in mud. The nets wheel away
so often now, sinking through days
poured furious over threshing feet.
As though dared in a foreign tongue
to knot our sleeves, we swim through
broken oars, shout off slender days.
Snakes may cling to trees, and men
tear at bread, but the sky stays hinged.
Only heaven is full of furniture.
We harness ourselves over and over,
wherever hope is a yellow shore.

[Robin Schaer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent ten years writing this book. I might be biased.

[Marli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of my favorite reading experiences are the times I come across a line that makes me stop and double back to reread it because it is beautiful and true. I did this several times while reading "Shipbreaking," and committed several lines to memory.

I loved this book. It's complex and beautiful, but accessible. Schaer has a specific talent for saying something simple and direct in a way that you've never heard before.

Several lines and images that really stuck with me:

In "Property," she waits all Spring for "missing tulips."

I must have placed them wrong, with roots reaching up
and sprouts growing down"

In "Shipbroken," a ship that she spent several months on is at the bottom of the ocean, and "our beds are full of water now."

In one of the final poems, Schaer writes a poem for her son, her "greedy passenger:"

You make yourself from secret blueprints, a shapeling clutching a manifest of your demands

Detailing the world they were both born into:

There are seven white rhinos when you are born.
A year later, six. I try to tally the animals vanished in my lifetime and loose count.

I'll be returning to this collection again.

[Anthony Tognazzini · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will make you feel as though a violent storm is fast-approaching, which it is, and that you are listing dangerously in the swells, which you are. Fortunately, Shipbreaking doubles as a life raft. These poems are fearsome, nuanced, meditative, tender, exacting, and necessary.

[Rylee Bronk]

this book was very intense, because there was a baby born while a ship wrecked in a hurricane.

[BookishStitcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed quite a few of these poems. She captures emotions so beautifully.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poems though sometimes a bit too dense and overwritten. But she moved me nevertheless and that's what I want in a book of poems.

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 2 out of 5]

word salad, pretentious. The poems have good form, and you maybe impressed by Schaer's word choice, but you'll find yourself exasperated at trying to divine the meaning of these poems.

Wreck

Hammered by stars, the island bides
its solitude with sharp trees of parakeets,

prospect fires, and years of wind.
Even coral must dream of cobwebs.

Every breath powdered down,
a legion of waves forbids my face.

This shoaled world is a hoarse hum
of shells. A refuge in halves: I am

forgiven by water, but savaged by sky.
Beyond the trooped reed, the world

is vague as horizon. My jaw is a distant
animal, the copper envy of tusks.

To return would burn the sails and rout
the heart. The sea is the opposite of falling.

I dont think this talent, mere pretense, and how do assume talent without possessing it?-by faking it.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite poems were in the second half of the book, so it took me a while to decide how much I liked this collection. I appreciated the way the poems fit together--I fully understand that not every book of poetry has to or should work as unified whole, but I have a personal bias for poetry collections that do. I absolutely love the book's cover and title, which set the perfect tone for what's inside.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book resonated with me in ways I am struggling to articulate.
It is the electric anticipation of an approaching storm.
It is the push and pull of wind and words.
It is the smell of hot pavement and ozone and it is the crisp sun and windburn of Winter one day after the snow.
Schaer's writing is startling in its elegance and power.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schaer’s work is a wave of language that sings its own ocean hymn. From a deckhand’s perspective, (a ship that was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy) her words ripple, carry you out to sea, haunts and shows its love. Recommend even if you’re afraid of the sea!

Favorites
-Flight Distance
-Coal
-Safekeeping
-The Liger
-White Matter
-Middle Flight
-Insomnia
-Wildfire

[Erica Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

These fierce poems show us that fear and desire can never be separated. We want the storm, yes, but we also want to survive its fury. Or, as Schaer writes in "Disturbance," "Current / is the cure for both a stopped heart / and one that beats too much."

http://ow.ly/XrCZY

[Stalfos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I received this book from a Goodreads giveaway.

Disclaimer: I've put off reviewing it because writing about poetry makes me feel woefully inadequate.

It's lovely and aeolian. It's bloody and bittersweet and hopeful. Read it.

[alcides · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leí la traducción al español publicada por Komorebi Ediciones.

«...
Nuestra cantera se vació
en la bahía de otro hemisferio.

Me guardé una piedra de la bodega,
la forma que tu hombro deja

en mi palma. Trece semanas
sin ancla, solo vela»

<3

[M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book from a contest. I enjoyed it. I have not read poetry before so it was very different to read but the verses where interesting and the content kept me engaged.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book after reading one poem from it online called Natural History. Love the nautical themes tied in with motherhood and other elements of nature. I'm definitely a Schaer fan.

[Karen Craigo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poet Robin Beth Schaer is fascinated by science, and her curiosity informs all of the poems in her stellar debut collection, Shipbreaking (Anhinga Press, 2015).

The poems are alive with precise detail and a sense of the poet’s insatiable desire to understand. She is adept at making connections, and maybe connection comes naturally, to Schaer and to all of us, if her poem “Disturbance” is any indication:

… We are
electric; this is not metaphor.

Each of our cells a tiny battery:
membrane the cardboard, ions
the coins. Once, I tumbled down

a flight of stairs, then fainted
each time I tried to stand.
Overcome by nerves in riot,

the body powers down, crumples
rather than abide. Even swooning
is a kind of fainting, overwhelmed

by bliss, instead of pain. …

Later in the poem, she continues exploring the curious fact of the body’s electrical charges:

… Current
is the cure for both a stopped heart
and one that beats too much.

And if it must be shocked twice,
the surgeons call it a reluctant heart.
Love is haywire. Hold fast,

between us, pass subtle particles
that singe and seize. We are electric.

One poem, “Middle Flight,” suggests that Schaer’s curiosity about the world is deep and intrinsic, and that she is willing to go to the mats to figure out the answer to vexing questions. Here is a favorite passage of mine:

But to hide in faith
is easier than to contend with doubt.
What moved through sky I once believed

was holy. I buried moths and blue jays, and kept
a shoe box reliquary of feathers, rockets,
and airplane spoons. Somewhere in childhood

an equation is fused between elevation
and milk. It begins this way: too tired to stand,
we reach toward arms and find altitude.

Because I have a personal interest in lighter-than-air flight, I was especially intrigued by this poem, which, according to the notes, “quotes balloonists Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, Jacques Charles, and Colonel Joseph Kittinger” and “Refers to the early aeronauts Sophie Blanchard and John Wise, and cluster balloonists Larry Walters, Adelir Antonio de Carli, and Jonathan R. Trappe.” The poem appeals to me because it takes Schaer’s research and both personalizes and poeticizes it, making it moving and quite lovely.

In my brief interview that follows many of my appreciations, Schaer attests to her love of research and her onetime desire to be a scientist instead of a poet. And the publisher’s press kit for Schaer’s book points out that she spent two years as a deck hand on The Bounty, a tall ship and an accurate reproduction of the HMS Bounty. The ship was ultimately lost in Hurricane Sandy, and its captain and another crew member died. She addresses the tragedy in the book’s eponymous poem, which investigates the event in a manner both nuanced and wise:

We never said sinking. We said
in distress. We mustered on deck.

Waited to abandon ship. Not yet,
we said, still night. She heeled

starboard. Buried the bow. We said
she’s going. We said don’t lose me.

[…] We thought
not this. Not her. We were alive.

We drowned. We were never found.

Schaer’s vivid imagining of what befell ship and crew puts the reader right there, on a ship, going down.

A few observations of my own and some snippets of poems from the book fail to do justice to the poet’s project—a probing of the world and its natural mysteries, not the least of which are its human mysteries. This is a book that rewards careful reading, start to finish, by those who, like Schaer, relish inquiry.

[Tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were several poems in here that I loved (Middle Flight, At Home, Endangerment Ending, Natural History), many with excellent lines, for example, from Natural History:

To say I made you is inaccurate. You make
yourself from secret blueprints, a shapeling
clutching a manifest of your demands, the parts

salvaged from my body. The revolutions are sudden.
In-between marine, you command dark tides
and destroy me in your making.

But I also found many of the poems a little too... abstracted and emotionally indirect? Especially compared to poems like The Long Now and Holdfast, which hit me _really_ hard when I read them online.

[Kristin Pinter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received this book as a Goodreads Giveaway. I had heard a lot of buzz around this book of poetry and was so excited when I received this in the mail. This entire book is beautifully written, well put together, and in its entirety, beautiful.

"...We said go slow but were urgent
as elephants, charging down
the power lines. Now the lights

won't stay on and the trees
are down. Sleep until you're done,
I'm awake, brushing hands along..."

To poetry lovers and haters alike, I think this book would have atleast one poem that will relate to anyone. I normally prefer more classic poems, John Keats, etc., but this may be one of my new favorites!

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual, I found poetry to be confusing and unclear, but I though this was gorgeous to read. I was never quite sure what we were talking about it but I was enjoying the experience. I read it out loud so I found some cool alliteration and stuff that I wouldn't have otherwise noticed. I thought it was a nice collection.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cryptic. Worth reading slowly.

[Barbora · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most subtle and clear works of poetry I've ever read.

[Angélique Jamail · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful books of poetry I read in the last year was Shipbreaking by Robin Beth Schaer. I keep it on my nightstand and flip to a random page sometimes before going to bed at night just to read a poem that will clear my mind.

It's one of those books whose poems are so finely wrought that their artistry emanates from every syllable without coming off as pretentious or too academic or more-poetic-than-thou. These are poems that feel intentional in their craft and heft, and which tell intimate stories. But they're not an "easy read," by which I mean they aren't accessible to a fault: you can't read them without paying attention, your mind really focused on something else. These are poems that feel glorious to wrestle with, and when you're done, you feel like you've read something that matters.