Sasha Steensen, _Gatherest_

 FROM 2017--NOT her most recent (that would be Everything Awake, 2020), but the first of her books I have read, and I was impressed. Three long poems or sequences, with two based on elements ("Waters" and "Aflame, It Itself Made") on either end of "I Couldn't Stop Watching," a montage of short essays and heterogeneous documents.

"Waters" and "Aflame, It Itself Made" are about water and fire, respectively, but also seem to be about faith and spirituality, and about writing, and about family--Steensen's daughters are a presence in "Waters," her parents in "Aflame" (the fire that destroyed their home is the poem's occasion). 

"Waters" is subtitled "A Lenten Sequence." It was composed, one poem a day, during Lent of 2012. The subject matter is sometimes religious--

taking up

what no one

else wants

to carry

this is its own 

kind of worship

faith 

is the substance

of faith

the difference

between air

& water

--but by no means exclusively, as the poem also takes up events of the moment like the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Adrienne Rich. The quoted poem (# 11 of the sequence) is reasonably typical of "Waters": pared down, well-balanced between the concrete and the abstract, seemingly surrounded by a deep quiet.

"Aflame, It Itself Made" was my favorite--an odd thing to say, it occurs to me, since a lot of the poem is terrifying. It carries an epigraph from Eliot's "Little Gidding"--"redeemed from fire by fire"--but it reminded me more of another poem written during the London Blitz, H.D.'s Trilogy. And sure enough, what should Steensen mention on p. 110 but "H.D.'s burnt tree," with its prophecy that fire not only destroys, but renews.

"I Couldn't Stop Watching" works as a link by not trying to be a link. Is it somehow Earth and Air, with its ruminations on syntax and prosody and its tributes to predecessors both famous (Catullus and Dante) and all but forgotten (Jones Very)? Or the workshop out of which the other two poems came? Not sure I could quite make the case for any such argument, but the piece does seem to belong where it is, a bricolage tugboat bobbing along between the two visionary flights, somehow responsible for getting them out in the wider spaces that is their proper haunt, well out, beyond.