AN
INSTRUMENT FOR LEAVING
Monika Zobel. Slope Editions, $14.95
($5 S/H) paperback (77p) ISBN: 9780988522121
An
Instrument for Leaving is full of trains. Fittingly, Monika Zobel’s collection, which
won the 2013 Slope Editions Book Prize, is filled with poems of travel, transience,
and otherness. The book deals with
translation not only of language, but translation on a personal level. Rather than telling these stories directly,
as in an essay, Zobel describes the ineffable through imagination and language. The book is equal parts play, terror, and
loneliness.
The poems are about what is, but
more importantly, about what is not.
They are poems of instruction and poems in conversation, spliced
together between italicized and un-italicized lines. Imagination takes over—what
if a you and an I lived inside a coat pocket—leading to beautifully terrifying
worlds such as a birthplace where, “With each new death the magistrate erects/stop
signs on footpaths. Soon school children/won’t
arrive for their pickling lessons/on time.”
Zobel also offers poems of family, the hardest part of leaving and
returning: “Only I know how/to untangle the static. I cut/ the navel of our birthplace//while fish
freeze into/winter sleep.”
There are so many surprising turns
of phrase (“I lived two bus stops/from forgiveness”), new metaphors (“The ocean
always responded/ with rejection letters”), and unlikely verbs (“Dried leaves
motorcycle/in our lungs”). The titles
set the scene and keep us interested: “The Immigrant Searches the Map for
Countries Larger Than His Palm,” and “Tell the Villagers You Have Returned as
Translation.” But the poems don’t always
lead the way we expect. Zobel captures
so much of what the A Instrument for
Leaving does in her poem “Hear it Whistling,” when she writes:
Explain to an environmentalist
what language does
to us, what it feels like
to float between two
languages. Begin with
magma and end at ice caps.
(April 2014)
Purchase
An Instrument for Leaving HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Christy Crutchfield’s novel How to Catch a Coyote is
forthcoming from Publishing Genius in 2014. Her work has appeared in Mississippi
Review online, Salt Hill Journal, the Collagist, Newfound,
and others. Visit her at christycrutchfield.com
