A collection of meditative verses that views life in these United States through a long historical lens.

Ogilvie, a painter and the former poet laureate of West Tisbury, Massachusetts, arranges this collection of poems, art, and photography around themes in its opening work, “The Last Berth on the Mayflower,” about a Pilgrim woman’s hardships and hopes. Sometimes, as in “Thanks Taken,” she directly critiques the worldview of Colonial settlers as “God’s elect, self-chosen / to bring order into a ‘new world,’ /….a wilderness / hostile to your godly virtues of order and control.” But she also ranges far afield, taking on contemporary issues. “Wake Up Call,” for example, views a sudden storm as a “testament to how rough our times can be / and will be as we ignore suggestions to improve climate.” In “Until This Coronavirus,” the poet imagines humanity as a fragile collective, writing that “with covid 19 I see / A very endangered species—us….Like a herd of wildebeests I see us blind and / Running.” “I Can’t Breathe” voices outrage on behalf of “George Floyd who used a phony $20 bill,” “the black community with a knee on their neck,” and “the environment starved for years of oxygen.” Several poems take shots at President Donald Trump: “Sometimes It’s” likens him to Hitler, Stalin, and Bonaparte while “I Recall” avers that “tRump turned us into a Police state / now a triumvirate: US, Russia, China, / with North Korea and Israel on the side.” There are less overtly political poems, as well, including pastorales, reflections on loss and aging, and a quizzical ode to neutrinos. There are even whimsical jibes at British royalty: “If they would examine Harry’s DNA we would see / he doesn’t belong to them.”

The author writes in a wide range of poetic registers, from the gentle, homespun lyricism of “Domestic Me”—“Tonight I will gather all my kitchen brushes, and as it rises, will scrub the face of the moon”—to the apocalyptic foreboding of “The Next Time.” Paired with the poems are color reproductions of Ogilvie’s art, which provide a vibrant counterpoint to her verse. The paintings are divided between lush, sensual portraits and abstract works that tend toward rough-textured tiles of bold, solid colors or delicate, pastel tendrils. She also includes photographs of snow-covered beaches, livestock in fields, and vivid moons rising over placid seas. Ogilvie’s impulse to connect small, intimate scales to vast, geopolitical ones sometimes overreaches, as when the speaker kills a wasp in “Not Being Here Put On Hold”: “Now like DH Lawrence / and his snake, I will live in regret and guilt, but / would I do it again, go ask Assad and Putin.” She’s at her best, as in “Turkey,” when she’s raptly focused on telling details that bring the world around her to life: “On you come / proceeding with the delicate peck peck peck / of your deliberate scrawny neck sorting / among the seeds which yours, which not.”

Occasionally heavy-handed poems enlivened by evocative language and striking visual imagery.

Ogilvie’s (You: Selected Poems and Knot: A Life, 2008) new collection of poems and paintings delights the eye and the mind.

Searching for what she describes in an author’s note as “language and meanings not discovered in my previous work,” the poet experiments in this book with several aspects of her medium: sound, syntax, and rhythm. Long-lined couplets surge forward with jetlike propulsion, and casual observations reveal surprising emotional depths. The first images of “Counter Top,” for example, are easy to grasp: “what to do with ten crystals on the shelf what to do / with three helicopters chopping overhead what to do with three hundred pieces of beach glass.” Where they lead, however, is harder to fathom: “we could generate books which meant nothing but words or without / words a thing between two covers meant to keep you guessing / meant to keep you at bay not meant to go to bed with you who does that anymore.” The poems, organized alphabetically by title, frequently comment on the business of living life and making art in language. “All Do Not All Things Well,” which begins the book, explores the problem of putting experience into words: “it was new unsyllabled unsayable illiterate babbled at.” The concluding piece, “Writing,” acknowledges the rare, hard-won result: “We wake up holding one gold nugget from the night’s mining.” The colorful paintings in this beautifully produced volume, on several full-page color plates, combine solid, talismanic forms with repeated shapes, including crosses and opaque circles. A striking pair of portraits looks out at readers with clear, watchful faces. Some paintings have a Mark Rothko air about them, with bands of quiet color in differing widths and placement. The openness of the images—partly due to the abstract, geometric compositions and partly due to their simplicity—allows for the busier, sometimes-breathless effect of the poems to hum with auditory energy. 

Verses that offer glimpses into rarely mapped reaches of consciousness.