Failure Lyric by Kristina Marie Darling

Failure Lyric

by Kristina Marie Darling

BlazeVOX Books, 2015

ISBN: 978-1609641931

54 p.p.

When is the measure of a failed marriage not a failure? Perhaps when it produces as startling a group of poems as these. Failure Lyric is an archive of the final days of a marriage. But in its pages, we also glimpse the first days, days in which the end was already foretold.

The speaker allows us a very intimate glimpse into her numbness and her feelings of fatalism. We see what makes her feel overwhelmed, and what makes her feel she was doomed. To her, there always seemed to be another woman around the edges of the tableaux presented in these poems, especially in the section "Failure Lyric." These are poems in which the speaker does not know what will work to make things seem real again. We have to sit with her in her world with few landmarks. She grasps for what she can. Ritual does not work for the speaker here. Neither does domesticity. The speaker attempts to interact with her surroundings, only for them to seem to mock her, to highlight her failures.

We get the impression that the marriage was doomed from the start: the speaker says the wrong woman showed up at the altar, leaving her a mere witness to the mistake of her marriage. But by witnessing this mistake, she also feels responsible for it. She was supposed to be someone different.

The book’s structure is one of the most remarkable things. Even as the speaker seems paralyzed, the structure itself moves and changes. After a preface, there are three sections. The book is bookended by two erasures of poems. The poems within are both experimental, using white space to convey hesitation and long lines to use rhythm to interweave her life, past and present, with the world of symbols that permeate the poems. The lineation at points suggests numbness, being overwhelmed and alone. At other points, it suggests little stories, memories, fragments of time. Repeated lines give a sense of a continuing story, and yet we know we only have fragments. I’m intrigued by the idea that there is a lack of communication between the absent spouse and the fact that the book is framed with erasures—which hide or omit some words.

Winter. Snow. Frost. Ice. The backdrop of these poems is one of winter with its grey, lack of cheer, and deathly stillness. They are spare poems, without unnecessary decorations. The language also suggests the frozenness that the winter imagery does. These sentences are numb and incapable of all but the smallest of motion. Thus, the poems take on the feel of snapshots: time is all that moves in these poems. The book also takes place across several cities and towns, from St. Louis to Boston, Burlington to Iowa City, literary cities, but stripped of their connections. Ultimately, the way we get from one to another is outside the story that this book tells, outside the realm of its language.

These poems also rely heavily on archetypes and symbols, repeated motifs and structures to carry the emotional weight of such disintegration. For instance, we have the garden and birds. But these are poems which are often set in winter, so the gardens are rarely lush, and the birds are often dead or disoriented.

There are also many repositories of memory in these poems: archives, museums, and docents. The idea of this life being something pressed, behind glass, something to be inspected and investigated, but no longer a life belonging to someone is further conveyed by these choices of archives. And yet if the people do not move, the only thing that seems to move is time, shown in fleeting snapshots where the characters’ positions have moved, often from town to town. Lost time and regret permeate this book. It feels like it often speaks only through halting speech, hesitation, silence.

So what does it say that this song of a failed marriage is a lyric? A lyric is a short verse of emotional intensity. I think it adds to the definition to think of these as lyrics, given that they’re a chronicle of being overwhelmed by emotion to the point of numbness. Overall, the effect is exquisite: we feel like we stand alongside the narrator, peering in at her life as scenes of a diorama. Rarely have I felt so close to a speaker as I did to the speaker of these poems. And rarely do we get such a raw, focused portrait of the numbness of loss and being unmoored, which this book shows in unmatched fashion.

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Kristina Marie Darling is the author of nearly twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay), Petrarchan, and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014. Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. (Bio adapted from blazevox.org).