Alison Stone
9781625494252
CW Books (2022)
$19.00, 112 pp, paper
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Reviewed by Jocelyn Heath
Much about Alison Stone’s To See What Rises defies expectation. There are no tidy sections, no artistic titling, and none of the technique-heavy verse we’ve come to expect from most volumes of poetry these days. What we find in these pages is sharp scrutiny of our modern world and careful craft delivering powerful truths without pretense.
The collection, dedicated to the poet’s late mother, deals often with aging and the change that comes with it both of their own accord and as part of the larger cycle of societal deterioration Stone observes around us. In “Won’t Hold,” the title a seeming allusion to Yeats’ apocalyptic “Second Coming,” she takes us from “Time of my thinning bones/and crocus necks broken by snow” to the devastation wrought by climate change and the “#metoo man” (21). The personal angle, too, gets explored; in “After the Doctor Appointment,” amid other hints of illness, the poet remarks that “Scared to leave this world, I fail/to see it” (89). While the poet cannot resolve these timeless questions of life and death, she gives us much insight in grappling with the issue.
Close attention to seasonal imagery enhances the cyclical movement of these poems. “April, with Corona” reminds us that “Spring sticks to the lesson plan—/blossoms, brash light, gaudy shades of red” (33). Even as the world moves into the season of rebirth, deadly disease erupts in a perversely parallel new growth. Likewise, the “rough clouds and shadows” of “the sun’s predictable descent” is disrupted by birds “tearing a slit in the still sky” (63). Even as the poet turns toward the natural world, she understands how fickle it can be: “I’m startled by a bush on fire.//A closer look reveals not flame,/but cardinal” (89). The world we may think of as object takes on a life of its own.
Like a handful of her contemporaries, Stone tackles head-on the political turmoil of recent years. In the only poem sequence of the collection, “Election Cycle” chronicles the 2020 presidential election, seeming victory, and startling insurrection. We ride the waves along with the poet: “the country readies like a hunter, crouched” through “the giddy exhale when a car/that almost hits you stops in time” to “Just one bullet, roses blooming/from the hole in one white throat” (85-7).
Among the most impactful poems in the collection are those that deal with the experience of being born and raised female in America. “Why I Didn’t Report” catalogs all the reasons for a teenage girl to not report her rape. Perhaps the most harrowing of them: “because a girl learns/how the world will treat her body/and her words” (59). Even in this darkness, Stone finds the contrast and explores it; “Diana Explains about Actaeon” reclaims feminine power through the story of Actaeon as lesson learned. “He needed to learn,” she writes, “how an object feels” (45).
While at times, readers may want section divisions or perhaps a clearer pause to dwell on a particular theme, the onslaught of poems and ideas is overall effective. How better to approximate the relentlessness of life than with poems that come at us as quickly as changes in our lives?
Above all, Alison Stone sees the world and delivers it to us with incisive clarity. For even as “a fire-scarred forest/isn’t poetry,” she reminds us, “the remaining/finches’ gold comes close” (93). In her words, we see the flutter of those bright wings.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 3.
Jocelyn Heath is an Associate Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her first poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue, came out in November 2022 from Kelsay Books. Other creative writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, and Fourth River. Her book reviews have appeared at Lambda Literary, Entropy, The Lit Pub, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.
Alison Stone has published five poetry collections, including Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack. She is currently editing an anthology of poems on the Persephone/Demeter myth. www.stonepoetry.org www.stonetarot.com
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