Book Review: Spill by Kelle Groom

Reviewed by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Spill
Poems by Kelle Groom
Anhinga Press, October 2017
$20.00; 118 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1934695548

There is an untrammelled and bounding energy that resists constraint in Kelle Groom’s latest book of poetry, Spill. Groom seems undaunted by multiplicity—in fact, she dives over and over into the seas of multiple realities, unimpeded by conventional boundaries. Her work inhabits a full spectrum of experience, with no sense of stepping into or out of a tidy middleclass existence. It is an all-embracing wash of realities.

In the opening poem, “The Lost Museum,” there is the fervent if troubling line, “If someone must saw open / my chest I want all this light to be what spills out.” There is not only the presumption that life might or must involve someone sawing open one’s chest, but also the enlightened vision about what the speaker hopes she harbors.

This early and literal mention of spilling is passive, as the collection also contains poems in which the spill of language is actively engaged. In “L’Amoureuse,” a rhythmic incantation of anaphoras enumerates what “she has.” A deceptively adorable spill of incisive comparisons expresses, then, seemingly, normalizes, one’s profound insecurities:

She has the breaking point of my hard plastic pink flipflops

She has the hypnosis of my shuffle to the kitchen for coffee

She has the conversation of my black caterpillars in their fur

coats, curling uncurling by the door last winter,

hello, hello

Then, suddenly, the speaker summarizes them:

She has the song and dance of my rage turned against the self

The way Groom equates the quotidian and the submerged is striking. There is no marked division of the register shift, from morning kitchen coffee to rage against the self.

In an early interview, Groom remembered her first encounter with Jayne Anne Phillips’ work and her own sense that she had previously lived in a house with closed windows. While reading Phillips’ book, “shutter after shutter opened.”  That is this reviewer’s experience with Groom’s book. My own dutiful avoidance of risk was spilled over and revealed as a rigidity that limits encounter with life.

That spill connotes the motion of liquid is appropriate. There is tension in the book between (perhaps impermanent) stasis and motion. One can detect this dynamic even in the number of locations—they are often emotional states given place, then inhabited on multiple levels.  

In the spirit of listing, here are some poem titles in the book that allude to location:

The Lost Museum,
St. Petersburg
Helltown
Shark Bite Capital of America
The Anti-Suicide Hotel
The Nun Hotel
Community Sleep Disorder Clinic
South Station, 1968
Hôtel Dieu

These titles refer to places of ruin, of transience, and in some instances, unexpected transcendence. Though, in Groom’s hands, this is felt first as a vivid awareness of the temporary thereness of objects, and simultaneously, as an eventual and even longed for spilling into a vastness of ocean.

In the shapely stanzaic poem, “Estate,” which seems to itemize objects as in a sale, the list of objects includes the following:

someone turns

a teapot, tries to read the message on the bottom.

.

The box at my feet looks familiar,

Labeled “Writing” in purple magic marker.

Poems I’d written on envelopes, bills

The end of the poem offers this perspective:

but there are thousands of lives getting ready

.

to push toward the hush over head, the raft

of weeds.  I move a coconut out of their way,

clear the main drag down to the sea.

Here, even in these lines extracted from the poem, one sees vivid temporality. The very premise of the estate sale objects severed from their origins allows for momentary nostalgia. However, that halting the motion of time long enough to notice that the marker is “purple” and “magic,” for instance, is always in the context of continual motion “to the sea.”

The domains of the poems are temporary locations on the way somewhere. Or, perhaps, on the way to not being somewhere known.

In “Booby Trap,” the speaker reveals:

I liked to purposefully

get lost in cities turned around

I thought that if I paid no attention

to the streets     signs     I could run into my life by surprise     the one

that always hid from me in my horizontal      parallel existence

Many of the poems feel autobiographical, about running toward life. The speaker is sometimes a waitress, often on the road, sometimes alone in diners, once with a stranger who “wanted to show me a building that appeared thin / as a credit card, or with a dark hole through the center.” The speaker of these poems is intrepid. She goes where she sees to go. She is not constrained by self-imposed restrictions, at least not in the narratives that emerge in flashes in these poems. There is an absence of hesitation, a spilling over into whatever fascinates, what is alluring. A shadowy cast of characters inhabits the poems, a “friend not quite / My friend.” In the case of “The Anti-Suicide Hotel,” “I thought it was the Suicide / Hotel.  Waking, / I knew I had to find it.”

This poetry is self-aware, skillful, and reveals a honed attention to language and its origins and resonances. Take, for instance, the haunting poem “Hour,” in which the sound of the word, rendered as “Ow wah” evokes a beloved and deceased uncle who called it that, as well as a whole desolate and almost howling world, “in need of a blanket, everything cut and named.”

Groom’s work remains dauntlessly free-floating. As the final stanzas of this daring collection announce in “Hôtel Dieu,” she

could glide

into the ocean, seagulls carrying stars

in their mouths, dropping them from the sky

.

to crack open on the sea round rocks, the path

leading into the horizon not here,

invisible, but I can feel it saying, come along.

And so we would “come along” with Groom, into her fully felt worlds, towards them, without prejudice, without even knowing where we are led, with an almost quiet unflinching faith.

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson is the author of OPINEL (Bauhan Publishing, 2015), and two chapbooks (Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, The Heinrich Böll Cottage in Ireland, and the 2008 Fellowship in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India, 2011. Her poems have appeared in Agni, Field, The Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, Ocean State Review, Salamander, Slate,Taos Journal of Poetry, The Tupelo Quarterly, and featured in VerseDaily among others.  Her poems are included in two anthologies, Cadence of Hooves and Thirty Days, The Best of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project’s First Year. Rebecca lives in Marlborough, NH and teaches poetry at Tufts University, Medford, MA.