Sycamore: Poems

by Kathy Fagan

FINALIST FOR THE KINGSLEY TUFTS AWARD Meditative and richly written, this collection of poems by Kathy Fagan takes the sycamore as its inspiration—and delivers precise, luminous insights on lost love, nature, and the process of recovery. “It is the season of separation & falling / Away,” Fagan writes. And so—like the abundance of summer diminishing to winter, and like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree’s expansion—the speaker of these poems documents a painful loss and tenuous rebirth, which take shape against a forested landscape. Black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them. Cottonwood sends out feverish signals of pollen. And everywhere are sycamores, informed by Fagan’s scientific and mythological research—shedding, growing tall, pale, and hollow enough to accommodate a person. Fluidly metaphorical; filled with references to film, sculpture, and architecture; and linguistically playful—“Word games reveal a lot,” says Fagan’s speaker—these poems unflinchingly lay bare both the poetic process and an emotional one. Spellbinding and ambitious—finding catharsis in wordplay and the humanity in nature— Sycamore is an important new work from a writer whose poems “gleam like pearls or slowly burning stones” (Philip Levine).

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 2017

Reviews

[L. A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sycamore is extremely accomplished, with poems that range from the more personal to broader concerns. Maybe it it is my own mood tonight as I read, but I was most drawn to the shorter lyrics in this collection, which seemed to me to work in the most surprising ways. I loved the caesurae that disrupted the center of "The Plane Trees of the Seine," (15) and the unique word play and sprightly approaches of "Shoo Fly," (25) and "Word Problem with the Waves in Its Hair," (60) among others. The surprise of the breaks/turns between stanzas in "Split" was incredible, and it is a poem I will think about for a long time. The poet has a strong ability to write endings and this book was a pleasure to read.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathy Fagan's Sycamores is a collection of poetry that is about lost and fading, but enlivened by bits of the surreal or by Fagan's sly humor. Like Berryman, who Fagan invokes in her epitaph, there is a negative capacity of ambiguous emotions often represented by Sycamores in winter. Contemplative but doesn't veer into being ponderous or a dirge, Fagan's collection should be savored.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Stationary ocean. Electrified song.
Color: snow day with autumn
leaves inside it,
glassine sheers of cantaloupe & kiwi on
lavender, gunmetal, jetwing--
...
Sparrow shuddered in her dustbath swath of pleasure."

[Melissa Barrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a sharp & persistent book, thoughtfully sequenced and full of spectacular words. The speaker in so many of the poems is someone I admire -- she is funny, precise, but not too focused, which is another way of saying she is still able to be lost.

Some of my favorite lines:

"I'm worried about the house and its snotty new crybaby face."
"I am dumb runes, / I am quarry, querulous. More stone than wood, I will not burn. // More flesh than stone, I will not carve."
-"As you pass, though I look impassive, pass over."
-"We queued up to touch her / hand, that never learned to write,"
-"So you lay / beside me once, my body so often / a ruin beneath you."
-"There's a key out there / lying in the grass, / and then there's me, / not looking for it."
-"Back then, we were a match / For June: arrogant, promising, feverish."
-"I fell from there to here / with the velocity / of a fat, hot tear."
-"the key I / taped to the plague with your name on it, / to your locker, the plaque, the wreath, the lager, / a luster of yellow lanterns reflected on the lacquer / of the blacker Lethe canal."
-"I was like Paris all piano"
-"I believed the world was done with metaphor & then the leaves came into bud"
-"I made many more mistakes & corrected almost all of them except for the ones that would become the best stories"
-"If captured, say you went to the Kroger / to buy sugar for the hummingbirds."
-"We watched / their breakdown / in the sky, // till all was white / on white on white. / I'll never write // a poem to you again."
-"This time it would be // cello-deep, train at the ear and core-heat clear."
-"But then there's us, our bones on blue, / Our panicked manes, snow flurries fixed or lightning's / Ragged wedding swatches hung."
-"There are so many auto fatalities / on plane-lined streets here,"
-"Outside the cemetery, someone's Magic-Markered / a locked electrical box with the words Sexe Toys. / The plaques on the graves nearby are inscribed / Souvenirs and Regrets. Which are, even in my language, / polite ways of saying Done."

[Deirdre Fagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sycamore is an unusual kind of love song. Each poem is an opening and a closing to the listener where there are keys and locks and play, and what is disclosed is often not fully disclosed.

The speakers are frequently coy as the poems gesture towards the past but also to the present, from the mystical and magical, to the everyday, and even the ordinary, like the platanacea family tree that precedes the poems and moves from Geb all the way down to "Gray Dish of Butter."

The poems are steadfast, sky-reaching, roots driving down, beautiful and sometimes light and fierce and strong, and all have (often surprising) bite.

There is intimacy and lust and love and death and destruction and rebirth in "Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more."

Ultimately, there is rebirth.

A beautiful collection.

[Dani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I honestly had a difficult time starting this collection of poems. I wanted to be drawn into the poems right away, but found that I was missing the message the poet was trying to say. After I pushed my way through though, I found there were a few enjoyable poems that I loved and I kept reading so I could potentially find more poems I liked.

It also helped that my poetry class was able to Skype with Kathy and learn a little more on how she came about writing "Sycamore" and what it was that she was trying to tell her audience.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sycamore might be Fagan's best book to date. Haunting and lyrical, it's sad without being overly tender, and if it is tender, it's tender in the lonely way that feels like a familiar bruise. The organizing structure of the sycamore lends this book its contemplative air that feels almost Romantic--the waxing and waning of nature is shared by speaker and reader alike.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cried.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathy Fagan's book 'Sycamore' shows an incredible depth and art, painting with words and intention and feeling. This book was a delight and an experience.