Review: The Forest of Sure Things by Megan-Snyder Camp
It’s relatively easy to hear about the major books by the major poets coming out around the world; similarly, within Australia’s writing community, it’s easy enough to keep up with the newer names emerging. What we don’t often get to read about are the volumes published by independent presses internationally—especially those that focus on poetry. In addition to the essays and interviews on this site I want to offer a glimpse of some of the books appearing around the globe, especially work by poets in the early stages of their career and poetry in translation.
The Forest of Sure Things
by Megan Snyder-Camp
Tupelo Press
USD $16.95, 978-932195-88-0
The poet Megan Snyder-Camp opens her debut volume The Forest of Sure Things [2010] with boisterous, sock-it-to-me apostrophe in the book’s prefatory poem “Sea Creatures of the Deep”: “O sockeye O rock sole O starry flounder.” This playfulness shows a poet willing to take delight in slightly absurd moves; similarly, the book’s second and final section is preceded by the poem “Church” in which a preacher tells his congregation that “Wile E. Coyote’s lifelong quest/ for the Road Runner was like us hungering for Jesus.” These poems, however, are at odds with the quieter and more opaque tone of the body of the book; nonetheless, both “Sea Creatures of the Deep” and “Church” play an important role in The Forest of Sure Things, creating a rapport with the reader that will carry their trust into the poems whose pleasures are not so immediate, but arguably more lasting. This debut collection takes the story of the first birth in a century in a small seaside village (followed by the couple’s second child arriving stillborn), and weaves through it Snyder-Camp’s impulse to take up elements of this story in a novel, as well as glimpses of her own marriage and entry to motherhood. Though these elements recur through the book, and it is roughly divided between the first section’s engagement with this external story and the second section’s more personal poems, the book doesn’t strictly present a narrative, instead creating a series of stills which allow the reader room to fill in the gaps in between.
The books first section is titled “Borrowed Memory” and in “Our Shipwrecks Build Houses” Snyder-Camp shows us how she came to possess the story of the seaside village directly, recounting a dinner conversation:
…Another story that night
I took for my novel: a local girl
the town’s first birth in a century.
Her brother stillborn. Years—even now—
I made a home of their loss, adjusted their beds,
added a third child, erased her.
This gesture toward the writer’s co-option of this story works because it shows the reader with great precision the uncertainty of the act of the creation. Those two births, representing such hope and devastation for both the family and, presumably, the town, haunt the poet, who can’t help tinkering with the story. Her act of first adding then taking away another child is poignant because the twinned life and death of siblings—the true story—contains the greater resonance in this simple retelling. The fact that the speaker has made her “home” in this family’s loss for so long seeps through the poems, and the simple facts come to haunt the reader too as Snyder-Camp returns to them again and again.
At times an almost magical mood settles over the poems. This mood is enhanced by the facts of the inherited story behind the first section of the book: the town’s stasis in the absence of births or children takes on the resonance of fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty’s century of sleep, or the emptiness of Hamelin after the Pied Piper has led the town’s children away. The volume’s title poem enhances this mood with its matter-of-fact explanation of the way things are in this place. “The Forest of Sure Things” opens:
In this land the children tear their hearts in half.
Let me explain. If ten things are wanted, only ten
can be had.
Such a tone is remarkably similar to the direct telling of fairy tales.
Through the poems the sense of this town being a law unto itself steadily increases. In “Wake” the poet writes “The casseroles just showed up”; while obviously the thoughtful gifts of neighbours wishing to offer something to the grieving parents, this arresting opening captures that out-of-time consciousness that accompanies grief. The mysterious casseroles appear seemingly out of nowhere like many gifts offered in consolation. Likewise, the very landscape brings mysterious offerings, as in “Season” when “The oranges were the first to arrive,/ bobbing along the coast like subtitles.” In this collection the thing directly in front of us is a miracle. The museum or exhibition as receptacle of such objects appears a number of times in the collection as in the poems “Contingency Museum” and “At the Visionary Art Museum,” enhancing our wonder at the place objects take in our lives.
As in the poem “Our Shipwrecks Build Houses,” the poet shows the reader the conscious construction of her book, and her personal story at the outset of the second section, entitled “Tether.” In her poem “Recording” Snyder-Camp recognises a change of her poems when she sees
The poems I was writing were no longer the poems of their divorce,
my father’s sweeping gestures or his pain, the old Volkswagen
and garden hose—all of that had washed from my poems
and instead an imaginary family arrived in borrowed gardens,
their son stillborn—even as I grew heavy with my own son
I wrote poem after poem holding this imagined horror close.
Once again the self-consciousness regarding the writing of poems succeeds: once again the Snyder-Camp shows the reader how her book came to be, and in this instance the (presumably) biographical facts of a writer engaging with her subject matter while living her life is poignant. Despite the focus on this “imaginary family” and her own marriage and son, we do get glimpses of the poet’s own childhood, as in the poem “Sunday Nights at 8/7 Central” when she writes
as a girl I’d typed telegrams on the keyboard
of our dark computer to let aliens know I was not threat,
here’s where I am, this house, this room, this highway:
stop I would say to avoid pressing enter…
Such glimpses, presented as autobiographical, further fill in our picture of the sensibility that shaped the poems that make space for wonder in the everyday world.
Most of the poems in The Forest of Sure Things are chiselled in free verse; however Snyder-Camp does make use of two forms—the cynaghanedd and the acrostic—that are notable for their rarity in serious contemporary poetry. (An exception to this is the book-length use of the acrostic by the poet Anna Rabinowitz in Darkling.) One, the cynghanedd, is a Welsh form of such intricate sound arrangements that its rules must daunt the poet not already well versed in Welsh prosody. In her use of acrostics, the poet forms the names of children’s books down the left-hand margin of each poem, and Where the Wild Things Are, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and The Very Hungry Caterpillar appear as added delights. These titles don’t necessarily seem integral to the poems except as a shaping device for the poet, but the fact they are embedded in the poems reminds the reader of Snyder-Camp’s recurrent concern with motherhood throughout this collection. One prose poem, “Chincoteague Island” also appears; this poem stands out for seeming to belong to a different book, because the narrative of pair known only as Red and Blue appears unconnected with the larger narrative gestures of the book as a whole.
Nonetheless The Forest of Sure Things is a debut volume almost without missteps: each rereading unlocks new facets and brings greater pleasures to the surface.
