Reviewed by Melinda Kaye Wilson
Laura Solomon’s newest collection The Hermit drops its reader into a complicated dreamscape, one in which bats “eat themselves like chicken wings” (14) and “a witch made of sand / returns to the sea” (17). The poems are simultaneously confessional and guarded as they detail the loneliness, anxiety and confusion that their speakers encounter.
The title poem expounds on this loneliness yet removes it from the speaker. Solomon writes, “the copper pheasant cries / inconsolably it cries for a mate it cannot find” (4). Rather than predictably discussing suffering in relation to the speaker, Solomon disconnects the heartache from the speaker and attributes it to a bird, allowing both speaker and reader to gain some distance and perspective. Throughout the poem, the bird continues its lament; finally, a hermit soothes the pheasant by “putting before it a mirror” (4). The mirror suggests that loneliness involves a sort of illusion, that no one is ever really alone—Solomon explores the concept of multiple selves in later poems—while concurrently, the poem also intimates that, in some ways, solitude is the only truth.
The theme of solitude recurs throughout the book. In “One of Each,” the speaker refers to solitariness as her “constant companion” (3), and in “French Sentences,” she asks, “is there anything lonelier than a lost glove?” (20). The repetition risks becoming dull and predictable, but Solomon avoids that trap by complicating the speaker’s loneliness in “French Sentences.” She hints at the different sides of herself by referring to Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet, famous, in part, for his numerous heteronyms and pseudonyms. Solomon writes:
in the morning you can read Pessoa and cry
you
can read Pessoa in the afternoon and this time cry for a different reason
and yes for the same reason you can cry but without having read Pessoa
it
is true, it is true, it is true
without having read Pessoa you are an entirely different person crying out (18)
A complex and fragmented character, the speaker seems divided into many parts of herself, each part with its own emotional response to, in this case, Pessoa. And it is not just loneliness and lamentation that dominate Solomon’s speaker. Other anxieties, some about mortality, are also evident, as in the poem “Dream Ear, Part II.” “today she is young but tomorrow she smells like her own urine,” writes Solomon. The poem points to a fear of aging and deterioration. And in “Dream Ear, Part III,” Solomon reveals that the speaker harbors some guilt: “everyone dies and it is all your fault” (9).
The Hermit contains many moments of paradox. Like the pheasant that only obtains comfort when it sees its reflection, the speaker of the poem seems trapped. In “White Flowers,” the speaker complains of insomnia and states, “the cycle repeats it breathes / like all things truly free / it has no choice” (29). Freedom typically implies choice, but here the choice becomes burden. The poem closes on this thought, and the speaker impresses upon the reader that our very existence seems to plague us: “you have to be free to breathe but / you have to breathe to be free” (31).
Solomon’s most impressive skill is her ability to create a
speaker that is, at times, openly distraught, filled with anxiety, conflicted
and tormented, without ever letting the reader tire of her instability and
unpredictability. She layers her speaker with complex characteristics, and one
of the book’s only flaws is its tendency to occasionally wander into
overwhelming profundity without adequately building up to that climax. For
instance, the opening poem in the collection, “Places,” consists of a series of
questions and answers. The poem closes with the following lines, “tell me of
your dream / I will tell you of a fire that burns without smoke” (1). While the
poem benefits the collection in that it immediately sets the backdrop of a
dream-like world or state, it also pushes the reader away with its prompt and
perhaps predictable abstraction. Solomon’s collection, however, impresses, and
it reminds us that our dream worlds and realities are often strikingly similar.
Melinda Wilson is Managing Editor of Coldfront Magazine and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Verse Daily, Arsenic Lobster, The Lumberyard, Augury and Agriculture Reader. Her chapbook Amplexus was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2010.