
Paradise Is Jagged by Ann Fisher-Wirth Review by Anders Carlson-Wee
Paradise Is Jagged by Ann Fisher-Wirth
Review by Anders Carlson-Wee
Publisher: Terrapin Books
Publication Date: February 1, 2023
ISBN: 1947896601
Pages: 116
A Hopeful Quarrel
In vivifying contrast to the navel-gazing of most modern American poetry, Ann Fisher-Wirth’s Paradise Is Jagged takes an expansive, abiding stance. Here, the stakes include the personal, but reach far beyond the self. Here, a tree is not a prop or a setting, but a character to be reckoned with. Here, exquisite details of two young sisters learning how to iron handkerchiefs “on our own small boards” dwell in and around a sense of time that swells far beyond the human scale. In the tradition of the California naturalist poet Robinson Jeffers, Fisher-Wirth is able to see and render a reality beyond the human, but unlike Jeffers, Fisher-Wirth endows humanity—and humanity’s future—with the possibility of grace.
Paradise Is Jagged is divided into five sections, each dealing with distinct themes while also seamlessly building an ever-widening conversation about life and death, memory and time, nature and humanity. Section I conveys a range of childhood scenes, yet even in childhood, time presses down on life with terrible urgency. In “Ironing,” for example, after we learn that the young speaker’s father is a soldier at war in Korea, we jump abruptly to the present grief of the speaker’s adulthood:
…………..And I recall the chapel—my navy blue wool dress,
…………..my fear to touch his face,
…………..one bronze chrysanthemum petal
…………..falling on his hand. Our mother telling the undertaker,
…………..Let me fix his hair.
…………..He never wore it parted quite so high.
In these lines, detail is everything, and can be right or wrong: the part of the father’s hair, even in death, must be fixed—in the sense of correctness and also in the sense of permanence—as the poet fixes the scene (and its corresponding grief) with that same level of loving exactness. It’s worth noting Fisher-Wirth’s talent for juggling time: this instantaneous leap of more than fifty years is not an uncommon impulse in the collection, and is used to arresting affect; yet Fisher-Wirth is equally invested in a discrete moment’s gravity, as in the poem “And Behind Us, Only Air,” which meditates on a photograph of the speaker’s sister, taken ten days before her death. At that time, the speaker had a cold, so in the image she leans away from her dying sister, “afraid to give her / one more thing to fight, and it hurts / that someone seeing this photograph // might think I’m avoiding her.” As the poem nears its end, the two sisters are contrasted:
……………………….I feel messy,
…………..unfinished; there’s too much of me,
…………..I’m too given over to life, and all that has
…………..been stripped from her. She has gone
…………..beyond grief.
I’m drawn to the speaker’s fear of being misinterpreted by an image: if seen the wrong way, the photograph creates a false narrative—an avoidance of the sister, rather than a desire to protect her. It’s an achingly complex moment, and plays with the idea of attachment through images of leaning: the speaker, ironically, leans away in order to love, yet is also “too given over to life”—a kind of leaning toward; meanwhile, her sister leans away from life and attachment, having gone “beyond grief” to a place of acceptance. Fisher-Wirth manages to render this richly complex moment in graceful, simple language.
The collection returns again and again to such resonant personal moments, yet also expands far beyond them, offering an immense and transcendent context for human drama. The poem “Catalpa” considers the endurance of a tree across history:
…………..This tree is older than Columbus….Before the Depression, the yellow
…………..fever, before the burning of Oxford, before the University Greys left
…………..their classrooms for the battlefield and died or were wounded to a man
…………..at Pickett’s Charge….Generations moved about beneath its boughs,
…………..spoke and loved and died as it grew.
This is a good example of my claim that Fisher-Wirth writes in the tradition of Robinson Jeffers, who favored rocks and hawks to human things; other poems confirm this affinity: in “Pecans,” Fisher-Wirth wonders if “[m]aybe someday this old tree will / come down and kill us;” and in another poem she writes, “What matter…if we X each other out, / the human race, we don’t deserve this beauty.” But while Fisher-Wirth exalts trees and the natural world, she never turns away from the human; rather, she explores modern humanity’s relationship to nature, in all its darkness and light. In “The day lays down,” the speaker passes “a yellow crop duster gassing up, / getting ready to spray poison.” Although this image is terribly bleak, the poem doesn’t entertain a spiritual abandonment of human things; rather, it provokes a human response. This is a poet engaged in a hopeful quarrel with the future, a quarrel that includes such topics as civil rights, racism, incarceration, overpopulation, the destruction of the natural world, and more.
To cope with such daunting human troubles, Fisher-Wirth turns to nature as a healing solution. In her ambitious poem, “Costa Rica,” leafcutter ants are “used to stitch wounds” because once their teeth are sunken into human flesh, if you pull them off, “their jaws, clamped shut,” remain intact, like sutures. Here, Fisher-Wirth fashions an ingenious image of nature’s violence repurposed to heal human wounds; I find it insightful, bold, and provocative.
While Paradise Is Jagged immediately seizes you with weighty themes, it sustains your attention with urgent, pitch-perfect music. Take these lines from “Jagged Paradise,” which remind me of Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion” in all their sonic propulsion:
…………..Every cicada sings us closer to winter now,
…………..darkness soaks the grasses, pools beneath the trees.
…………..Come here, little one, whoever you may be, the day and night ripen
…………..blood red berries of sumac, dogwood, roses.
…………..All the leaves are mottled and stained. Amen. Breathe in, it’s late October.
Notice how Fisher-Wirth sustains the long /e/ sounds across these lines, and how, in place of end-rhymes, she varies the distances between each recurrence of the sound, creating an energizing unpredictability while simultaneously sustaining a distinct prosodic pattern. This is the music of free verse at its best.
For a poet so profoundly inspired by the natural world, Fisher-Wirth strikes an appealing balance between the human and animal, the domestic and feral, painfully aware that all of it—even the transcendent—is subject to time. I’ll leave you with these poignant lines from “Costa Rica:”
…………..the urge to write my name on a tree because we pass, we pass, we will
…………..never be here again, yo soy, yo soy, I am the one alive right now, and here
…………..right now, and then not here, though the tree remains
Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Paradise Is Jagged. She is newly retired from the University of Mississippi, where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of Disease of Kings (W.W. Norton, 2023), The Low Passions (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. He lives in Los Angeles.
18 October 2023
Leave a Reply