Sebastian is well-known in the online poetry community as someone who champions the poetry of others. She founded Whale Sound, a Wordpress blog on which she and others read previously published poems, Broiled Fish and Honeycomb Press, the nanopress that published this collection, and Very Like a Whale, her own blog. There's more; she also created Voice Alpha, a companion site to Whale Sound, which explores reading poetry out loud. So sometimes, it is easy to forget that Sebastian is herself a poet. Dark and Like a Web will remind me that Sebastian is a poet....a thoughtful, deft poet.
Dark and Like a Web is a search, an archetypal journey to find he means to get somewhere or something; it's also about figuring out what that somewhere or something or even somebody is. In the beginning poem, the speaker, amidst "flocks of starlings/wheeling dark waves/ of loud chatter" tells us of a search that within this wave of birds, "I grope/for the memory of you..." We don't know who the you is; rather we know that the speaker thinks this you is "a small flame embedded/in silence."
Poems along the way speak to longing and loss. In the girl and the hours, the speaker describes a girl who "pulls up/a rough wooden chair/in hot wind" to observe the world around here and in her observation she "never feels/she is alone." Here we get a glimpse a kind of envy akin to longing in which the speaker seems to wish for a contentment the girls evinces. And in antiphony on the plain, the speaker how her lover has left her all while the rest of the world keeps going: "across a plain at noon/the curve of the giraffe neck/or distant blue volcano."
The final poem of the collection, when you come to me in the dark of night, is the realization of the search begun with the first poem. The you arrives (or has the speaker found this you?) into which the speaker can enter. "but when I have stilled myself in you/when i have readied myself." And finally, evoking images of baptism, "I rise whole from the pool at sunrise...." But something has changed. The speaker not only rises from the you but steps "onto you as a straight road/lined with cypress trees and warbler song." Certainly, the reader can speculate about the identity of you, attach to it the qualities of a deity. The speaker of these poems, doesn't mention an exact identity as if that's not the concern; rather part of the resolution is a kind of contentment with the you and its identity, a hearkening back to the girl and the hours, a girl who never feels isolated in the world.
Sebastian's notes about the poems and the collection are fascinating, but I'll not share a hint of them here. I wish that I had waited to read them after going through the collection several times. This is not so much a criticism of the book's layout as it is applause for Sebastian's poems because they skillfully carry the reader along, guiding when necessary, simply stating when not.
So, does a reader like me find my own mantra within the pages Dark And Like A Web? In other words, do the poems of the collection speak to me? Yes, they tell me that Nic Sebastian is a terrific poet who will take me somewhere and that I will feel a such a sense of resolution at that end of that journey I will go back to the beginning repeatedly to see just how we got there.
To learn and read more about the collection, click here.
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