Loom.

Ebeid, Carolina

Loom, by Sarah Gridley. Omnidawn Publishing, 88 pp., $17.95.

"She is spinning this world inside the other." Sarah Gridley's third collection, Loom, indeed spins a new world out of the dismantled one of Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott." Tennyson's ballad is mysterious: the Lady is secluded in a tower, forbidden to look directly toward the busy world outside her window. She must instead face a mirror, which catches glimpses of what passes her window's frame. She is forced to weave those images on the tapestry. Longing for amorous connection, she sees the "bold Sir Lancelot" briefly appear in her mirror, a sight that makes her turn from the flat life of reflections to that which is alive and real. The mirror cracks, and the curse is fulfilled as she dies in the river sailing to Camelot.

Gridley's Loom begins with that tension between reflection and experience. She writes, "Thoreau said the perception of beauty // is a moral test--and--How vain it is / to sit down and write // when you have not stood up to live." Gridley does not separate the mediated "world of shadows" (perhaps the province of writing, reading, perception) from the factual world we experience through all the senses; at times one serves as the warp, the other the weft. They are fused, and at times productively confused. The word "loom" itself denotes both the perceived phenomenon--to loom, to suddenly appear into view, to appear distorted--and the apparatus for making garments. Gridley's keen attention to the etymological histories of words invites us to do the same. Within the rich "textile" we read the "text." One senses that for Gridley the act of reading is a lexical experience, a transportive event.

For me, reading Loom is a transportive and lexical event. The book is patterned into three exquisite sequences. The first, "Shadows of the World Appear," introduces images that recur throughout the collection in various permutations, namely: the bath, which holds the floating body; the sea urchin, which we learn will grow "larger than its dugout" (where it shelters) "at which point it is said to be / IN FOR LIFE." The book proceeds tangentially, which is to say, the themes touch each Other--they don't make parallels. That notion of captivity calls to mind the Lady in the tower, or the isolated poet. Gridley writes, "Then it must depend // on food drifting to it."

The second portion of the book, called "The Heart is Dependent on the Outside World" is made up of prose poems whose perfect, rectangular shapes recall swatches of fabric, or the window frames that furnish the Lady's room. Present here is Gridley's gift to move with ease between quoted speech--often that of a philosopher or a naturalist--plainly declarative sentences, and a line that (playfully) communicates before it is understood, as Eliot said. The line "Light climbs the Latin" may sound unintelligible, but it becomes nonetheless true in the poem "Edifice," making tall buildings out of the letters. In what is an example of a plainer mode, "Was it anonymity or truth or hope when early photographers wrote in place of signatures, Sol fecit: The sun made it," Gridley beautifully complicates those ideas of perceptibility and image-making that pervade her book.

The final sequence "Half-Sick of Shadows" returns to a the slender line and white space, "Come to the spare page: / the imaginary world seems promised here. A fly-leaf says nothing." The book insists that the blank page, or the canvas, waits to become populated like the Lady's tapestry. But the illusion fractures, as the poems do, with the cracking of the mirror. In a way, Loom follows Tennyson's poem chronologically. The Lady's body becomes the beautiful object perceived and then depicted. Gridley shows us model and painter:

 She is paid alright
 to sit for the painting.
 If he can get her to float,
 fully clothed, in bathwater, it will this way
 solve the problem: how to give death (its real aspect)
 to the living subject. He is working so hard
 her teeth are chattering. 

Many objects occur and reoccur in Gridley's Loom: book of spells, hand at work, hinges, enclosures, markets, rivers, fog, the letter opener. She brings them all into the common field of the book, and while Loom is intricate with beauty, the poems are no mere tangle of knotted thread. The activity of this book is interconnectivity. "I wanted to transplant words onto paper with soil sticking to their roots" writes Susan Howe in Souls of the Labadie Tract, a distant cousin, I would say, of Gridley's book. I believe they may share a common relationship to the idea of correspondence with the dead, and to words themselves as organic things.