Riversent

by Laura Chalar, Brian Daldorph (Editor)

Laura Chalar's Riversent is an ambitious poetry collection filled with childhood memories and those of a dead father with poems that also explore motherhood and a passion for literature. Chalar manages to convey a Uruguay that is seen through her poetry totally anew, from its familiar people and local birds to its endearing landscapes. Riversent is woven with complexity, depth and skill, a wonderful window into Chalar's poetic work. As she says, "the heart's language is spoken/in a luxuriance of dialects." Leo Boix

Familiar themes of regret, grief, and the passing of time are expanded on in a sequence "Over dark water," which explores the lives of Romantic writers Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley, and their contemporaries. Though set in the 1800s, these poems feel fresh and vivid, setting histories of conflict and loss alight. Zoe Brigley

40 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 17, 2022

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s common enough to hear folks say that a good writer can find poetry anywhere and everywhere, but Laura Chalar’s collection, Riversent, is a masterclass in actually doing it. Chalar’s poetry - reflecting on motherhood, lost parents, memory, and grief – tells many of its stories through ekphrastic readings of Uruguayan visual art and interpretations of archival records of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s years in Italy before his death. Unlike William Carlos Williams’ poems inspired by Bruegel’s paintings – probably the most famous examples of ekphrastic – Chalar doesn’t just re-paint the images for us in words. Instead, she looks at an image and finds not only the artist’s story, but her own, previously invisible to everyone else but then suddenly so obviously there that it’s impossible to imagine anyone not seeing it.

After reading her “Emptying the Closet,” responding to Lucy Duarte’s Traperas, I can’t stop seeing a grown woman, turned young girl again, mourning the loss of her Daddy and still “crying over shirts / long warmed by other peoples’ bodies.” These really might be his “ties / toughing it out at the office” and his shoes and suit walking in to an interview. Similarly, in “Maternity with Window,” Chalar teaches us how to re-see the familiar, to look at Eduardo Amézaga’s Maternidad con Ventana, knowing we’ve “prayed to her, still do sometimes” but today seeing only a mother and child who “have shed all / supernatural attributes, divinity / and majesty” leaving only “another tired mother.”

In Chalar’s prose poems, based on the Shelley’s correspondence and poetry, we see the hand of a mother who has known grief behind the scenes. Mary is sympathetic, devastated by the loss of a child and enraged by the infidelity of a husband, though “drawn as always towards the magnet-force of his persuasion and [their] love,” while Percy is egomaniacal, responding to the death of his daughter as yet another detail in his own life’s romance, but thoroughly confused by Mary’s refusal to come near him after this loss, “No matter how radiant the waterways, how silky the flow of life in the venal city.” Something makes me think these are fairly accurate portraits, but they are no less Chalar’s for their fidelity. Like I did when reading her ekphrastic poems, I found myself seeing these old and familiar characters in new lights.

Not all of the poems in Riversent are in direct dialogue with another text though. Some of these are the most touching. In “Julio,” my favorite of the tributes to Chalar’s now-deceased father, we glimpse, perhaps, some of the origins of Chalar’s skill for finding and noticing as she tells the story of the day of her birth. Feeling happy, her father went out

for a coffee so as to be able
to sum things up a bit.
He needed to take stock
and notice, to gauge the depth
of that wonderous winter advent

I see Chalar taking stock of so much in these poems: memories and hopes, grief and a bit of magic. And in there somewhere, in the act of pulling this all together, it’s like, once again, “We’re so young. A bright century is about to begin.”