North | Rock | Edge: is a walker’s encounter with the coasts of Shetland, testing what the lyric can do on the fractal edge between language & a planet’s / broken / openness.
In somatic memory of days on foot, in carried shards of rhythm and thought, & in the real time of their composition, the poems voice both landscape & inscape, to altar what we cannot alter, be it the planetary energy of cliffs & waves or the irreversible environmental damages we have authored and now fear. From first to last, a reader is asked to define a coast—as line, boundary, fractal form, ecotone, landing place, & geological remnant, both generator and recipient of tremendous forces.
The Shetland archipelago lies on the 60th parallel—half as long as the equator & two-thirds of the way to the Pole—a border-land where almost-north gives way to North, a sensation of place impervious to political boundaries, though not to anthropogenic change.
Extending the collage practice of earlier books, this new work drills core samples from others’ poems—reading / vertically / what had been laid down / horizontally—creating fragments dense with allusion and sound, yet small enough to carry in fast-moving lines, along with wind, light, tides, and currents; cliff-edges and storm-beaches; rocks, birds, plants, paths, and plastic. For both speaker & reader, attention divides, coheres, and divides again, carried by the forward-pushing, uneven rhythms of walking a varied terrain.
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A warning serves as bedrock ethic for Susan Tichy’s North | Rock | Edge: “Beware a thought / untaught by walking.” Perhaps it is a poem’s unique power to warn us against its own nature—the language can make of itself a world that supersedes the fact of the real one. Tichy will have none of it. Hers is a poetry that learns to think only by what the world offers as thinkable, the mineral fact of rock, the infinite force of ocean, and the contemplative strife of those potencies colliding. Any thought not engendered by such encounter isn’t to be trusted—a thing the mind can do merely by itself. But what experience gives us is its own epistemology, a perception not of landscape, but landscape as perception. —Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Variations on Dawn and Dusk
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Susan Tichy’s new collection is a thrilling encounter between a poet who relishes challenge and a world both ‘fleeting/ and fixed,’ in the words of an epigraph from Susan Howe. We might say that the poems are testament to what happens when you focus on ‘the thing itself’—on ‘a shatter of sea crow-blue/ then metal bright’—except, this is a world where there is never only one thing happening. Tichy defines her own aesthetic challenge as ‘how / to speak before / a planet’s / broken openness’. Her solution is a verse that is flexible and nimble, a poetry that is always aware of the breath. Perhaps this awareness of breath in her craft is what makes her work here distinctively American. —Tom Pow, author of Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness
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North | Rock | Edge continues Susan Tichy’s commitment to thinking on foot, to making poetic language immersive and bound to the ecological specifics of place. Here her poiesis takes shape in the ecotone between dune and sea, on the rocky shores and at the wrack-lines of the Shetland Islands. The resulting poems reflect the never-ending flux and eternal contingency of tidal places; choppy waves of fluent musical phrasing get caught up in jump-cuts before vanishing into salt-tinged white space. Over the arc of this remarkable book, reading Shetland with body and mind transforms into a nearly apophatic “transcorporeal” ecstasy as chill and wind-blown and total as the elements themselves. —Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days
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Cover art: “Sputsjela,” Peter Davis, watercolor & chalk on paper, 2019 peterdavisshetland.com
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Parlor Press PB $14.99 / E-Book $9.99 / Distributed by Ingram Global
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Susan Tichy 