English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

To Form the Constellations

Frannie Lindsay.  Where She Always Was.  Utah State UP, 2004.  61 pp.  $15.95.

Dan Hefko, Ball State University

            None of the poems in Frannie Lindsay’s first book are more than a page in length, and the experience of reading and returning to them is a little like gazing at stars in a night sky.

            Many of the collection’s poems shine with brilliant clarity.  In “Ladybug,” for instance, a refrigerated insect is found “clenched / between a field green and a crouton” and “stuck by a dot of parmesan dressing / upside down in limp salad; her tiny legs, except the one flicking, lashed damp / against her ebony belly; her red saran wings smeared shut.”  Of course clarity need not preclude depth, as the ladybug’s “sun stilled” death near the windowsill becomes a beautifully ambiguous omen for newly begun love (11).

            Others poems appear more clearly when you look away ever so slightly.  In “Remembering Stars,” the stars themselves and what the memory of them means to the speaker only begin to come into view when you train your eye just beyond the period of the poem’s final sentence: “Then I’d sit / on the stoop, my braids damp / with him” (28).

            And what would the night sky be without a few stars that stubbornly refuse to come into focus?  Lindsay’s fable “Rapunzel Descending” is likely to leave readers staring skyward, scratching their collective heads, and waiting for a signal to appear in the picture window of Rapunzel’s “treehouse” (17).

            “It was awhile before I understood what had come between the stars, to form the constellations,” Lyn Hejinian writes in her beautifully elliptical My Life (36).  Readers of Frannie Lindsay’s Where She Always Was are likely to come to different conclusions about what comes between these poems, but one of the collection’s great pleasures is the way it seems to actively invite the participation of the reader in the formation of constellations.  Equally inviting are the unanswered questions that bracket the book: “How will I find you?” (6), “How close to here is missing?” (10), “What can we use for stars this year? (57) What will come back / as our plain, dear stars?”

Work Cited

Hejinian, Lyn.  My Life.  Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1987.