Book Review: Ornament by Anna Lena Phillips Bell

Reviewed by Alix Anne Shaw

Ornament
Poems by Anna Lena Phillips Bell
University of North Texas Press, April 2017
$12.95; 84 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1574416657

Anchored in the piedmont of the Carolinas, the poems of Ornament are propelled by their sense of place, a burgeoning landscape that can be inhabited but never contained. “I have known . . . / no name that holds every hollow,” writes Anna Lena Phillips Bell in “Piedmont,” “the name can’t name the whole.” Instead, Phillips Bell exuberantly catalogues the landscape in language deeply inflected by both the dialect and music of its inhabitants.

Throughout the collection, human attempts to define or control the environment fail as the land proliferates. In “Trifoliate Orange,” the narrator gathers wild oranges, sugaring them for marmalade, but “still it was fierce, more sour than storebought.” Similarly, attempts to create a border between the Carolinas are merely “rickrack trim,” stitches that “won’t last long . . . the way we dance down here—stay all night and don’t go home, come dawn step out and look: land that does not brake for state lines, pauses only for river, stops only at sea” (“Girl at the State Line,” 21).

As the collection’s title suggests, Phillips Bell’s poems are intensely lyrical and elaborately patterned, bringing to mind the music of a dulcimer. Indeed, regional music is integral to the collection: throughout the book, the author invokes and directly references forms including Appalachian folksongs, bluegrass tunes, gospel music, and church hymns.

Like her musical forebears, Phillips Bell also adapts traditional poetic forms for regional use. In “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine,” she uses a Petrarchan sonnet to assert the narrator’s love, not for a man, but for the folksong he played. “I thought I’d take the player,” the narrator admits, “would soon / as sin settle for less.” But memory, like the poem’s form, ultimately “holds the music—never mind the man.” In “Midafternoon,” slant-rhymed quatrains evoke Dickinson, while the book’s title poem celebrates folk traditions through the use of an intricate triolet. Similarly, Phillips Bell lays claim to the storytelling traditions of the South in her use of forms including slant-rhymed ballad stanzas (“Nesting”) and long-limbed prose poems (“Girl at the State Line,” 46).

Phillips Bell is at her strongest, though, when making use of looser stanzas that allow her acute powers of observation to shine through. Among the book’s finest poems is “Trillium,” a ghostly lyric that unfolds in a cascade of unrhymed tercets. Here, the narrator relates how she and her brother pass through woods “where the deer / lie down in grass and leave their bodies’ echoes / on the ground.” Later, they “[leave] the creek / night-talking” to walk “among green leaf and flame-white petal, / careful that our feet did not catch fire.” Even here, among the most delicate of plants, the landscape threatens to overwhelm its inhabitants, and Phillips Bell seamlessly channels its otherworldly power.

Regionally-focused collections often run the risk of sentimentalizing their subject matter, and Ornament is no exception. Most often, though, the author’s mode is that of insider anthropologist and cultural translator. For instance, she generously includes a guide at the end of the book (“Some Songs and Tunes”) to help familiarize the outsider with the music so deeply ingrained in the poems. In different hands, such a move might weaken the writer’s authorial stance, but in Phillips Bell’s case it is both generous and enlightening. Her inclusiveness at once does homage to her elders and reaffirms a sense of collective identity by insisting on the necessity of many voices. As she writes in “Piedmont,” “Call each a name / fit for speaking.” Listening to the songs is a pure pleasure that brings both the poems and their cultural context into sharper focus.

Like many first books, Ornament reads more as a collection of intricately-wrought individual poems than as a conceptually-based project. However, Phillips Bell distinguishes herself through her finely-tuned ear and skillful use of patterning to evoke the place she loves. “I’m going back to North Carolina,” insists one of the book’s folksong epigraphs, “And I never expect to see you any more.” One definitely hopes to see more from the author of this beautiful and promising first book.

Alix Anne Shaw is the author of three poetry collections: Rough Ground, forthcoming from Etruscan Press in 2018, Dido in Winter, (Persea 2014), and Undertow (Persea 2007). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Harvard Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, and New American Writing. Also a sculptor, she lives in Chicago and Milwaukee. Her work can be found online at www.anneshaw.org and anneshaw.carbonmade.com.