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The Novice Insomniac

Reviewed by Kent Chadwick
Free Press staff writer


The Novice Insomniac
by Emily Warn
Copper Canyon Press, 1996
$12 paperback


There is a smoothness to Emily Warn's poetry like that of round river stones. Her poems and river rocks have been made smooth by similar processes. Consider the main character in her poem, "Community Hall Courtship, Vashon Island 1945," from her excellent and subtle second collection, The Novice Insomniac:

"He picks up a stone, grey and round
as every other on the rocky beach
and thinks of how its smoothness
measures time."

The lucidity of the poems in The Novice Insomniac also measures time, the painstaking time Warn has taken to get the words clear and right. In so doing she fulfills the poet's true task, which as T.S. Eliot learned from StŽphane MallarmŽ is "to purify the dialect of the tribe." Listen to the first three lines of her poem "After Starting a Forest Fire:"

"While we lay in the sun
upriver in the place of the deer,
the flames licked at the puzzle-bark of ponderosa pines,"

The first line is simple and evocative, in the way that William Stafford was a master at. We can imagine the languid air; we want to imagine a couple wiling as couples will; but yet something is about to happen. The second line holds the suspense-we're not yet to be told-instead Warn gives us a vision of a place, "upriver," and we imagine a river we've followed in a wilderness we've entered. And she names that place "of the deer," and we can feel the bent grass warmed by a doe's body and that brings us sensually back to the we a-laying.

Now flames-that's what's happening, there's a fire. But is it metaphorical? Are "we" aflame? All our erotic imaginings are amplified with the verb "licked." Then Warn grounds us again with a physical description that is as musical as it is ominous, of flames on "the puzzle-bark of ponderosa pines." The poem goes on to show that, whatever else may be burning, a forest fire has started on the hillside, devouring pine cones, sage, cactus, and dry white grasses.
In response to this scorching of the earth Warn surprisingly breaks into a beautiful hymn, calling on that earth to live again in the precious things of that place-"in the resurrected grass, in the burst seed and snake," in the red cactus flowers, in the wasp, in the blue moth, in the stream's daisies and its dippers who bob underwater. In admission, she asks the earth to live in the couple who started the fire, and a the poem's peak, she transmutes, like an alchemist, the couple's lovemaking into the cause of that fire:

"where we lay kindling you, a fiery loving god,
who burned and smoldered unnoticed
long after our bodies were warm."

What began simply is now complex; the images of love and earth, river and fire are superimposed; the song of the couple has harmonized with the song of the "scarred but still living" earth.

The intensity of "After Starting a Forest Fire" is present in many of Warn's poems, the fine technique in all of them, yet this poem's incantory pitch is unique. Her poems are most often pitched to a minor key of sadness, to an honest reckoning with loss.

"I bored through despair to find
a prairie of grief, wind at my back
and snow."

- from "Kaddish"

Warn is acutely aware of natural beauty, but the question for her is "How do you bear such beauty?" Her poem "Evening Prayer" begins "I taste the bitterness of acorns," and that is emblematic of her sensibility. As I read and re-read her poems, they carve out a place in me of exquisite emptiness where "clarity returns, rainwashed, windstripped."

The most intriguing section of The Novice Insomniac is called the House of Esther, in which Warn explores her Jewish heritage and praises Esther Hillesum, a holocaust survivor, an earthy iconoclast who played an important role in the poet's life:

"Trouble
Began in pacing the Detroit desert
until I met Esther pacing the other boundary.
She knew God. Praised
how I'd survived.
We compared manna.
Whatever you can imagine
as the laws require."

-from "Trouble"

The title poem of The Novice Insomniac playfully describes the "hours of slate" when awareness is painful, when insomnia becomes a vocation. The Novice Insomniac learns how to hold the night in a box, how to hold all those who are sleeping in her lap, how to spin the stars before dawn. Warn details the malady's soft suffering in poems on "The Genesis of Insomnia," "On the Insomniac's Watch," for "The Insomniac Ward," and for the "Rusted Hinge Bed and Breakfast." Insomnia is a work-related injury for Warn, who takes such careful looks at the hard world. Her poems are always awake and stronger than coffee.
Author
Emily Warn



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Contents on this page were published in the March/April, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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