Beginning Revoke, the third collection from Joy Manesiotis, we quickly realize that this book’s making is an integral, considered part of our experience. Two veil-like pages demarcate our entry and exit from the space of lyric ritual into which we are invited. Within, several poems are set in white letters on black pages, seemingly in correlation with the collection’s intertwined themes of antimatter, loss, and the paradoxical connections that may be fostered across negative spaces in consciousness.
Before we even begin, the title’s italics and doubling as the first word of the first poem both complicate our engagement with words themselves, drawing attention to its multiple, distinct roles. This uncertainty—and complexity—correspond with the unease of the opening lines:
This
is grass, this is a table, this is a tree.
All nod: yes, yes (complacent, assured)
but a shadow slides over it, over the whole
known world: not a tree, a shadow tree, and the black crows
big as cats who strut at its feet are the real messengers,
jabbing for grubs, clasping the smooth ovals of pecans in their beaks,
(the witness speaks a mirror movement)
or if not messengers, then what?
The uneasy staging corresponds with the title’s self-referentiality; the poem seems uncomfortably aware of its own attempt to bootstrap a reality out of itself. Correspondingly, the speaker, a speaker-character, audience, and subject all seem to overlap, perhaps even aspects of one another, like inner figures in Jungian active imagination. These premises expand in consequence through the “shadow” aspects of psyche they introduce, unexpectedly though its very nature as a commonality of the human psyche:
What if, in the shadow life of the body, a million processes
firing in all directions—unseen, internal—one direction
goes off track, strikes out on its own path—
a cell thinking for itself
This: crow, this: elementary school
“This,” in its specificity, evokes the potential for a presumed part of a unity—through thought—to act independently, self-destructively, risking the security of the larger life. On both personal and social levels, the multiple potential meanings of “body” and “cell,” along with this return to consciousness of the shadow potentials of thought, complicate the opening wish for grounding and orientation through language:
All nod, yes, yes. We agree. We engage in the visible world
as if we know it is real.
This is the felicity of art. The charade that it will save us.
This candor releases the speaker’s thoughts and feelings before the image of the poem’s only specified character, the shadows of these contemplations themselves: “Her mother floats in her bed in the Intensive Care Unit, / a boat on calm water. She is in another world.” The development of the final scene indicates its role in the genesis of the meditation:
It is the illusion of time. That it is linear. That it moves forward, a trajectory.
That there is a future.
She doesn’t float. A moth pinned to the display sheet. Sheet of bed.
What time is it? she asks. She looks out the window.
Is it night or day?
That it is a fancy bed doesn’t matter.
The two opposing statements about the mother “floating” rehearse the movement from imagined consolation to present, mortal reality. Arriving here, we feel this moment of seeing through the magical thought, its grounding, painful relinquishment.
The common psychic potential for shadow to become consciousness fosters connection between the speaker’s empathic mourning and our experience of the poem’s transferable pathos, evoking in extremis both the specific and archetypal bonds between mother and child. We have participated in a poetic ritual through which imagination, thought, feeling, and compassion integrate into a grieving process unflinchingly moored in existential reality. “This” introduces, by example, the collection’s central practices.
“Sequence” connects poetic ritual with those of daily of care for the ailing, especially in the ways that such experiences are barely mimed in the abstractions of language, such as “Between if and when” and “Between maybe and we don’t know.” The uncertainties of physics mirror the pervasive awareness of relational impermanence evoked and released in “the dance” of the poem:
Every particle has its ghost particle: same mass, same spin: the dance
turns, the wail released slowly through the limbs
Between don’t sedate me and help. Between don’t leave me
and okay. Between don’t leave me and a shrug.
But she knew otherwise.
A shadow particle: dark madonna: marry spirit to matter.
Visual art, mirror matter, and spirit all offer broader contexts, yet the speaker concurrently adheres to the balancing, internal practice observing association and compositing within her own perspective:
Between demanding and pleading. Between fighting and giving up.
Between this nurse and this nurse and this nurse.
the whir of instruments, fan, monitors, machines, ocean’s
constant wind—that carried her farther and farther out.
Between day and day and day. Between night.
Though seemingly bleak, this view into and through the tenuous webbing of human consciousness deepens the relatable, connective pathos we experience in the poem: through the speaker’s suffering “in between” presence and release, we feel the paradoxical, corresponding persistence of the love by which she knows this loss, reminding us of the various deep realities of love in our own lives.
“Revoke” takes up an interrelated lyrical mourning for an unconceived child. The awareness of limited human perception recurs as a paradoxical opening: “Persistence of vision: the brain holds an image a fraction longer / than the eye: and the world doesn’t go black each time we blink.” The connective gaps between perception, consciousness, and external reality open the possibility of “(Her child meant to come through someone else’s body.),” which echoes through the poem. Such epistemological gaps also provide openings for imaginal loving connection:
We sit in a dark theatre half the time,
…
And the child would be given a gift, but to receive it,
she must suffer great loss, must be turned away from
the one who must also turn away
Through witnessing the witnessing itself, the speaker finds connection to the movement of life per se:
The body’s process: silent, internal: how film,
once exposed, begins to break down:
…
the body as healed: as perfect vessel: as holding it all
…
even the sharp dust scoring emulsion, scrim where image is imprinted, white lines
running through faces, waves, even the gulls:
…
a hum of revoke, revoke
…
the atmosphere itself
working at the film’s inner fabric
The section pauses function like deepened line breaks, parsing sentences into meditative movements, encouraging us to experience both their discreet unfoldings—often appearing to take place in their own contexts within the greater constellation—as well as the comprehensive development. Our reading of the speaker’s meditative process enacts the poem’s crafted change from outer theatre to inner film, the shift of consciousness from passive observer to intuitive witness of transformation within. This shared aspect of the poem offers us the experience of this movement, in which the specific suffering transforms, in part, by communicating its archetypal pathos, connecting through its own process of interior awareness with our interiority.
“Sign” helps to connect this ritual aspect of the poems with the earlier references to “the witness” which here appear as liturgical instructions that take on more esoteric and psychological implications, such as “the witness moves the wind through herself” and “the witness takes no form.” These reflections infuse the poetic rendering of the historical ritual described with personal and transpersonal significance:
We have no such way to mark it. You are not
in earth, (I won’t think what your body looks like now), here,
and in the other country, dancing to be connected, The references to “the other country” of the historical ritual take on dual implications, in which the past parallels an imaginal place in consciousness, another way in which death, despite separation, offers an enduring form of inner connection. Again, these connections also support those between the inner and external worlds, the lyric ritual and the dancing. “Skein” presents one correlative of these interplays through discussion of light in painting: the moment emptied of people— The atemporal space between light and image, particle and antiparticle, echo and shadow, outlines the meditative container in which this collection has taken place, within which we may add lyric rituals of our own synapsing and constellation. This book reaches from the personal to the archetypal through ritual that offers us its process of return to interbeing. Its light does not make light reading. Yet, the struggles it presents are generously formed to allow us many spaces in which to feel and think through its gaps and paradoxes into deeper conceptions of love, loss, and resilient understanding that holds us together where there is no ground beneath. Revoke, by Joy Manesiotis. Portland, Oregon: Airlie Press, October 2023. $18.00, paper. Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing When People Cut Off Your Head and Leave It Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala, and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and has taught at The Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, The Bowery Poetry Club, and several community outreach and children’s centers in Westchester. He is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
the bones lift clean,
…
a kind of offering, the child dancing for you, for all
she has lost,
each black-heeled shoe touching down, saying, I belong here, I am of this
…
and as you rise, the belief in the dailiness of you also fades—
(carried in the wind? brushed off with the dirt?)
…
no, no, the fact of the bones
…
the loss and calling back—
the child makes manifest in her dancing—calls it into being:
…
painted light as energy slowed
to solid, as if pigment carried the antiparticles of light—energy to matter—
…
the farther out we look, the further back in time
…
as invitation, entreaty, as in
beckoned
…
light holding within it the moment
of the image’s creation
…
particle and antiparticle: echo and shadow
Heavy Feather Review 