Reservoir, Elaine Fletcher Chapman, Saint Julian Press, Houston, TX, 2021, ISBN 978-1-7330233-5-1, 59 Pages

Liminal time is that moment of shift—relocation—renewal. It exists in a sense of presence or awareness of the moment. The poems in Reservoir tick with that kind of time and the sense of traveling inward by way of the natural world. In “Just This,” we witness shifting weather, spring trying to arrive while winter lurks at the door.

………………………….Entering liminal time, I picked the early daffodils
                        and brought them inside, before the deep freeze. (10-11).

Through awareness of both the natural world’s shifts as well as the interior shifting of a Self in the throes of reimagining identity, we cross the threshold of these poems as both witness and fellow traveler. We are company on the search for Self in a world where identity has so often come from others. The touchstones of that journey rise from meditations as varied as Thomas Merton’s, Hagia Sophia, Botticelli’s, “Madonna of the Book,” and The Radiance Sutras of Buddhist practice.

However, the reader doesn’t need an intimate knowledge of those texts to travel with these poems. The sense of urgency to connect with Self and loved ones are layers so accessible to the heart, they spring through on first reading. The mediations on the sutras, references to liturgies’ and nature’s seasons, and the juxtaposed needs for solitude and communion are layers as well; accessible to different degrees but offered without reservation.

EFC’s “Object Lessons” begins with the discovery of an index card on which the speaker had once recorded the days between menses (all inconsistent) and a quote from Virgina Woolf, “I don’t believe in aging/ I believe in forever altering one’s/ aspect to the sun.”(10-12). We recognize a path no longer open as “the term begins/ without me (21-22). And though there is no acknowledgement in the notes, EFC’s poem, reads as condensed reverie on Eavan Boland’s memoir by the same name. Both deal with the balancing act induced by being poet AND woman; or as Boland put it about writing poetry in late 20^th Century Ireland, “It was not even so much that I was a woman. It was that being a woman, I had entered into a life for which poetry has no name.” I had glossed over the lines

………………………….It is difficult to make sense
………………………….of omission, disregard
………………………….perhaps disrespect, standing
………………………….firm in what I know and don’t know. (17-20)

in part, because I thought I understood who was disregarding/disrespecting/omitting, etc. Surely that referred to whomever it was who had not taken the speaker seriously. But, returning to the poem, I found a new way of reading in light of the Boland’s claim that

………………………….[f]or anyone who is drawn into either of these lives, the pressure is to betray ………………………….the other [poet-self betrays woman-self/ woman betrays poet]: to disown or ………………………….simplify, to resolve the inherent tension by making a false design from the ………………………….ethical capabilities of one life or the .visionary possibilities of the other (Object ……………………Lessons, Boland).

Think here, of the ‘good woman’ an ideal society can get on board with, versus the artist who makes room for herself, eschewing the ‘false design of the ethical capabilities of one life.’

In Reservoir, we witness the intention to avoid ‘making a false design’, as in the poem “Integrity,” which reflects on the need to feed the Self versus the homeless congregated in the church next door.

…………………………………………………………………..…I have nothing
………………………….to give. Not even a friendly gesture, no encouraging
………………………….words. After forty years of helping. One person or family
………………………….at a time. I could not walk across the parking lot. Make that journey (5-8).

Instead  the “Preacher’s wife” holds space for her own silence and acknowledges the “…relief, not to feel judged…/A relief, not to feel shame I place on myself.” (11-12).

Merton wrote of Hagia Sophia, “She is in all things like the air receiving the sunlight.  …  She is life as communion, … life as festival, life as glory.” and later, “But she remains unseen, glimpsed only by a few. Sometimes there are none who know her at all.” (High Morning: The Hour of Tierce).

“Object Lessons” speaks to that resolve to keep faith with the “visionary possibilities” of the Self as Boland has described them. A struggle to coalesce/balance/create true reciprocity between the poet self and a woman, living ‘unseen,’ but still in ‘life as festival’ vibrates at the heart of this collection.  

To read these poems in small batches, with time to absorb their languages and experience their sense of both urgency and connection, is to be taken outside of ordinary time. Yet the quotidian of red magnolia seeds, elms in the backyard, the dogwood in bloom, and the reservoir itself, work as grounding details suffusing the poems with thresholds and windows. The poems do not explain the path, rather, they strew the path with obstacles of delay and isolation that have their place on the journey. A lost line of sight of the ocean is a lost sense of location that needs attention. Distance from loved ones, practicing setting boundaries—the abstractions of the psyche, all play out against the urgency to both move and stay still.

“Radiance Sutra #37” exhorts us to “Go to a wide open space./ Gaze without looking anywhere//” and explains that “//the light you see by/ is the light that comes from inside…”.

In her response poem, EFC asks,

………………………….Suppose this morning the dogwood
………………………….in the side yard took flight.
………………………….And the white petals with their center crown
………………………….landed in the palm of your heart. (16-19)

Light lost, light created: the spirit’s cry for help answers itself in the imagination; the light “…comes from inside” without our urging—without our command.

The reservoir has its own life cycles which are explored in “Reservoir: Cycle of Haiku.” EFC, whose mastery of the white space on the page shines throughout this collection, gives us that body of water in the spare increments of the form, with images accruing gradually into a year’s meditation, beginning with the end of winter in “# 1

………………………….Before the trees leaf—
                        a few buds, a daffodil
                        a new resolve

to #4

                        In a week leaves fill—
                        hinder the view, a glimmer
                        blue surface beyond

and as autumn comes round again, #14

                        As leaves fall away
                        the reservoir reappears—
                        deep sigh of relief.

Late in the poems, we arrive at “Sutra #74, which implores the reader to “Seek always the intimate joy/ Of your original self/ and move through this world in freedom.” Through this meditation we are invited to “return[ ] home:”.

“It’s who I am;” (8) the speaker avers in response to the sutra’s call for the “original self.” And that form of “intimate joy” sings down through the long shadows and urgent hours when the speaker has wrestled with a sense of displacement from Self. Returning home, to a child

………………………….biting into a ripe peach and letting the juice
………………………….run down my mouth and fingers into the dirt” (6-7)

has surely, for the moment, reconnected the speaker to “intimate joy”. In that moment, Hagia Sophia is with us—liminal and ordinary time work as one.