Book Review: Frozen Latitudes 2014 (Therése Halscheid)

Reviewed by Michael Northen

At a cursory glance, Therése Halscheid's poetic biography reads as though she is a transplant from nineteenth century British Romanticism. For most of her adult life, she has managed to find space and time to write through house-sitting, having no permanent residence of her own – something reflected in the titles of her previous volumes of poetry, Without Home and Uncommon Geography.

Her most recent book Frozen Latitudes (Press 53, 2014) is a natural extension of her past work, but with a twist that transforms it into something new. Frozen Latitudes braids the poems of two landscapes thousands of miles and several decades apart, both equally chilly. The first landscape is drawn from the time she spent as a resident poet in Alaska. The second is from her childhood and adolescence in Haddon Township, New Jersey during a time when her father slipped into dementia as the result of a botched surgery.

Poets' avocation as crafters of words also makes them very conscious of their medium's limitations. Halscheid's concern with the difficulty – if not impossibility – of genuine communication through verbal language begins in her very first poem, "When Just Enough Words Have Gathered at Windows…." The poem ends:

                  I want to breakthrough,
                      mouth open
voice
carried across

                 everything
                 opaque

sentence after sentence of moving    words
     over the winter earth,

            my father out of me.

It is at once an attempt to use language to do justice to her father by filling in those words he was not capable of and to exorcise her father from the hold that his memory has on her. Her words move across the wintery earth of her childhood in the way that the arctic wind moves across the snow of the remote Inupiaq villages that she visited. The final poem of Frozen Latitudes, "When Just Enough…"; is a sort of distorted mirror of the one that she began with or perhaps a palimpsest on which she can only rewrite so much. She admits,

         What I am saying is   what I am speaking of
                                        is hard to state

                 the words that come seem awkward
                           and hurried and

never fully divulge
       what trails us

Although Halscheid surely develops her own distinctive poetic voice, what she is attempting to voice remains elusive and many of the poems in the book concern with both the varied ways that she approaches this attempt to voice and the many instances in which she is frustrated.

The narrative of her father's dementia begins when "an error occurred on the operating table."

         my father, lacked oxygen
long enough to erase from his memory
the years that he had with us
("Mother")

It moves slowly towards his death (a thirty year journey), but the story loops back on itself. He is no longer able to recognize or speak of his life in the present tense, so when he does speak in the poems it is either when he is hallucinating believing he is in the past, in dreams, or when he speaks through the poet's thoughts. Halscheid has mentioned elsewhere that the surgery was one that was not altogether necessary and that her father himself had misgivings about it. This is referred to only obliquely in "Rowing the Sky" in which her father's deceased mother appears to him in a dream with a veiled warning of what was about to happen to him, but it may help to clarify Halscheid's extreme reaction to it.

Because I needed a father more than myself
because I cherished my father,
I kept seeing things I could not say
I kept not saying until it became important
not to talk…

I turned speechless about that
which could not be formed into sentences.
("Unsoundness of Mind")

The poet's reaction to her father's dementia is not merely to turn within and not speak, but to starve herself.

I am only fourteen. But you can tell I look old
as if life is ending. Notice how my limbs droop so
willow-like over the trash, see how the cans
are all packed with food, know that I am starving myself, I am
that full of my father…
("Trash Day")

The braiding of poems in Frozen Latitudes, is a rather lopsided braiding, giving most of the book to those poems that take place in New Jersey, and even within that strand there is a subsidiary braiding of the poems about her father and those about her own physical and mental reactions to her father, with the latter almost subsuming the former.

Halscheid's journey of Alaska certainly gives her a much different and larger visual landscape to paint than do her New Jersey surroundings.

Describing Bishops Beach in Homer, Alaska, Halscheid's poem "Letter of Stones" begins:

I wrote of the beach half-frozen in middle March,
of walking its hardened surfaces, and the way of my walk,
the timeless strides crossing the snow-covered sands to Kachemak Bay.

But what interests her about the natural world is not nature itself, as it might be with a Gary Snyder, but, like Wordsworth, it is what she can read into nature. If not a Platonic view, it is close to pantheistic. The poem continues:

All of this I wrote, of the curling of water, of the shapes of the cobbles,
but then added the look of them was beyond stones, more like beings
come ashore, gathered to talk with us as if they have something to say.

How Halscheid is able to make Alaska say something is a challenge, but it is one that she is up to. She gathers her material from a variety of sources including the landscape of Alaska itself, stories told to her by the Inupiaq people and interactions that she had with some of the land's residents. From a White Mountain Elder, she gathers "The Clan of the Owl," from a burly man wearing a "necklace of claws and a polar bear tooth" the basis for "Harpooning the Whale," and from Lisa, a white woman who married and Inupiaq Man, material for several poems. Each of these provide voices for the poems. There are too, of course, her own meditations.

Through her placement of the Alaska poems in the anthology, the poet invokes arctic images that spill over into the poems about her father. She imagines the arctic wind saying,

If, in this moment I speak with a voice
it is to say of the ground, it is not fit for trees

nothing grows here but snow
("The Telling Wind")

The comparison is to the bareness of her father's mind here. In some places the comparison is even more direct. The poem "Mother" ends with the four words, "his mind without Time," and the title of the next poem in the anthology – one about northern Alaska – is "Land of No Time". Such interplay between these two streams deepens the readings of many of the Alaskan poems, as well. For example, "The Yukon Quest, " on one level a true story about a dogsled race, reads:

What was it like after the whirling ended, when his body quieted,
…when the world came back to their eyes

and they saw land again as it first seemed, everything the same,
such vast areas of white

They sped in the wrong direction.

But knowing that this was just the poet's father's experience after his surgery, adds another layer to the poem.

The failure of words to communicate experience sounds through the poems like a leitmotif. It is present in her father's inability to speak, in her own silence in the face of her father's loss of speech, and in her inability – when she does try to write – to make her work express what she feels. This does not mean, however, that communication is impossible. Ironically, it is in the voiceless communication of nature that Halscheid feels most at home and closest to some sort of understanding.

The ability to communicate directly with nature is highlighted in another purposeful link between the two strands of poetry. The opening line of a poem about the writer's mother, "I read the lines of your palm" lies adjacent to an Alaskan poem that begins:

The Natives say that stones hold the history of a place,
they say you can hold a stone in your hand
and discern its mystery

that your palm will read it,
that your palm too can be read.

If Halscheid does not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon, she at least believes there is a moon to be pointed to. Though not a formalist, she does make effective use of conventional poetic tools. Halscheid is perfectly capable of pinpoint description, as she demonstrates in many of her poems, but inasmuch as her goal is less to describe nature than uncover what it may be concealing, the tools that she favors are those that are evocative and work through sound, especially alliterative techniques and repetition. In the first stanza of "Wordless" :

Dusk keeps dragging
its darkness
into the back garden
over the old stones
of the dead

The alliteration of d's and the drawn out assonance of the o's highlight the dragging. Then later in the poems, she switches up to syllabants and the liquid m's and n's as the subject changes to a more flowing ethereal:

At night, mistaken for mist,
it will be me who moves
gossamer-like, out of myself,

In a similar way, Halscheid frequently develops a cadence through the repetition of a line's initial words that works in tandem with the meaning, as in the lines quoted from "The Telling Wind" quoted above where many of the lines begin with "if" and "it is too." All of this creates a mood that shares a kinship Heathcliff's romantic brooding or Hardy's moors. When the denotation of cannot take the intellect over the gap, words need to find a way to hitch on to the emotions.

One of the reasons that society needs poets in our high-tech, scientifically-oriented world is precisely because words fail. Halscheid knows this from the outset. Nevertheless, it is in that space between demands for verifiability and the silence of the Sufi that the poet does her work. Halscheid's skill as a writer in Frozen Latitudes provides us with some of that space within which to travel.

Michael Northen is the editor of Wordgathering and an editor with Jennifer Bartlett and Sheila Black of the anthology Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability.