June 21, 2021
Elliott (California Winter League) gorgeously personifies nature and everyday things in her atmospheric latest. In “When I Was a Wave,” she writes: “I was willing to drink anything./ I found myself out gazing at stars./ The fishnets—/ I played them like harps”—that poem ends with “Let me tell you a story: I loved./ The days passed./ I sang the same old songs./ I left. I came back.” Elsewhere, as in “The Winter Mirror,” the objects are more mundane (“One day, we watch the laundry: a neon frock/ sings itself an aria in the flood”) and abstract presences are given concrete forms (“the angels/ are blue glass bottles.”) Some poems are shadowed by cancer and loss, which doesn’t prevent them from glittering with life. Ekphrastic poems in the collection describe modern jazz songs, such as “Composition No. 311” (“I am the bluest/ blue, I am the coat,/ I am the shoe./ Do you often/ know what to do?/ Maybe this is a test for you”) and “Composition No. 152” (“Maybe the song is a fluke,/ or maybe it means a dramatic view,/ or it drinks from the lake and tells something/ truetrue”). Elliott offers beauty and surprise at every turn.
Starred review from August 1, 2021
Elliott (At Most, 2020) takes the title of her fourth poetry collection from a song by Miles Davis, a tribute that forms the core of the book, which views color, music, and language through the perspective of an artist at work: ""I place a grid over everything and myself in the / foreground, the world suddenly in thirds (like a sectioned orange fruit)."" Elliott employs deceptively simple lists to render poems gauzy or dreamlike. In one poem, Elliott begins a stark meditation on migration (""that precocious moral territory"") with an evocative inventory, ""I'm speaking of blue ballast / & the swallows & the jonquils & / of course I think about / the early loss of love."" The logic of other lists may at first appear tidy, only to offer surprising entries: ""The miraculous grey zenith / The miraculous green creek / The flowers on the sleeve / The general sense of rain."" The enduring impact of Elliott's precision with language is one of enchantment and intimacy. Her speakers whisper runes, puzzle-like secrets that strike readers on a primal level before rising to cerebral comprehension.
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