“On the Seeing and the Succumbing”: Bewildered by All This Broken Sky
by Anna Scotti

Reviewed by Angela Gregory-Dribben

I imagine Anna Scotti observing from within a snow globe without the snow but with “the sun…beating glitter from the sidewalk, scattering diamonds in our path.” She steps outside of a moment, anoints it with clarity, and builds a lifetime into just one poem. Scotti’s attentiveness encourages the reader to commit to a vigilant eye. The precision and complexity of the poems urge me to read again and again. Otherwise, I fear I may miss something: a number in the combination lock of Bewildered By All This Broken Sky.

Lines that repeat throughout the collection give the reader a more holistic understanding each time: “soul of the bear,” or “that thing you did.” But the most powerful anaphora in this collection is the repetition of loss as hauntingly familiar as the Jaws soundtrack.

Immediately evident is the vulnerability of the mother in her relationship to her child and the way her heart is a constant casualty to time. Loss dapples the mother’s experience. By the time a moment registers, it is already a memory. In “Nine,” the speaker comments while watching their daughter and her friends, “It’s almost lost, this ability to be lost / in soil, water, leaves, and folded flower petals.” Scotti consistently anchors the reader in the ethereal qualities of love and loss through concrete images, thereby giving language to the ineffable.

An air of surrender to this awareness or even an embracing of forfeiture pervades many of the poems: “Your mother is speaking: / Don’t flinch in the face of all that angry beauty; breathe. / Know what it is to have enough love to squander.” It’s as if the speaker is saying, to live fully one must be willing to lose.

Deeper in the work is reflection on other manners of intimacy and their association to ache. In “Sixteen,” the speaker acknowledges the wreckage in romantic relationships: “It was the first thing we gave you, and the last thing we agreed on.” In “Santa Monica Pier,” the speaker acknowledges, “At the end there’s no right or wrong to it, / just a stroll down the pier, the papers tucked beneath / your arm and my hand jammed in my pocket, in case you might reach for it…// Night is coming, for those with shelter / and for those without… the moon hanging shamefaced / all our mistakes / piled up like driftwood behind us.”

The loss is not relegated to the altering relationship with children. The poet also encompasses the loss of a parent: “What it will mean then, is no one / left who remembers you before you / remember yourself.”

Intangible dispossessions—regret, the past—we all have them. On conceding youth the speaker tells us: “Before I vanished…before I disappeared…When I could still be seen, I pretended / then to be invisible, as I truly am now, pushing / my hair into silken masses, then letting it go.”

Scotti possesses an awareness of the ethereal we are entangled with. In “Ghosts” she writes, “The lover you do not have is patting your shoulder and kissing your fragrant hair and whispering it’s okay, oh you must have missed us, you must have been afraid.” This poet suspends us in the past, the future, and the present—ever aware of the loss that living demands, yet somehow makes it not just palatable, but desirable.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 3.

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