Review: Surgical Wing by Kristin Robertson

Reviewed by Samantha Seto

Surgical Wing
Poems by Kristin Robertson
Alice James Books, May 2017
$15.95; pg. 100
ISBN: 978-1938584343

Kristin Robertson’s poetry collection Surgical Wing tells a narrative heavy with illness, grieving, and healing. The speaker suffers from wounds that life has given to her and wishes to discover her own wings. In poems such as “Rules of Surgery” and “Clinical Trial: Human with Wings,” pain is evident in the way she lives. Plath’s “Dirge” comes to mind, due to the use of rich language in which she meditates on feeling like an injured bird or butterfly. In “Rules of Surgery,” she asks, “How else can a bird measure its neon wingspan, see itself / swoop from branch to wrist to a porcelain fruit plate / wild with butterfly wings blinking snake eyes?” Illness and wings align with the speaker’s personal struggle present throughout the book.

The speaker reflects on a hospital stay after surgery and experiments with clinical trials. “I hear it in the hiss through aspens as I wait for pathology, / barefoot on a balcony in a hospital gown and overcoat,” she declares in “Incidental Finding.” The poems act as a release for her mourning that heals her scarred body by granting her the strength. In “Emergency Rooms during Thunderstorms,” the speaker alludes to winged creatures in a hospital setting, as “Species of fernbirds and white-eyes nestle / inside our raincoats next to chest pains.”

This pain, mourning, and grief she survives gradually transform as healing begins. In “Incidental Finding,” the speaker elaborates, “Over five years my surgical scar has cooled / to a pale fault line, the slow tectonics of healing.” She clings to the memory of being a sick patient, barely alive. The poems share moments of life and death, love and loss. In “Scar,” the narrator reveals, “First night home from the hospital, I start a list of what we leave covered, like old Tupperware / behind the milk, or tombs.” The narrator also reflects on the tragedy of her loved ones: “she’s terminal as waterfalls or runaway / trains and doesn’t live in Oregon, a death / with dignity state, snowy with aspens, ticker tape / petals everywhere: It’s all over” in “Driving to My Friend’s House to Assist Her Suicide.” Yet even in the failure of the human body, she imagines wings. Robertson combines the two effortlessly. For example, in “Swan Song,” the speaker is metaphorically the swan. She expresses bodily pain inflicted on the swan, “When you come undone, when you float toward the razor / on the lip of your bathtub, float down / the night-quiet hall like a swan through an inlet, / know your body won’t make this easy.” The swan is a beautiful, angelic creature with two white, feathery wings, yet the body suffers in agony.

These poems are alluring, dark, and mythic. Robertson uses the trace of scars and death with wings to paint imagery. In “Hiking to Le Cimetière Marin,” the narrator uses both, “ahead she traces scars on headstones, dried funeral / rosebuds like pill cups flush with salt spray” and ends with “give up your dove, your angel, whatever lightness / helped you get here. Watch your white wings turn to sails.” The vivid language makes the poems come alive with intense, agonizing images. The narrator’s epiphany transforms her from the sick and hurt to the healed and restored. Robertson writes about wings as a departure that is a relief from her painful experience. Many of her poems are written in couplets, which suggests a pair of wings. In the final poem of the collection, “Will Humans Ever Have Wings?”, she concludes, “That will probably NEVER happen. / Evolution produces only what is NECESSARY, / not what is cool.” This last poem confirms her rational thinking.

Darkness is threaded throughout the book. The speaker’s solitary heart is confined to a hospital. She is a survivor of lonely times that have caused her pain and grief. In “Leaving Coins on the Mouths of Cadavers at Emory Hospital, a Defense,” the speaker confesses, “I eavesdrop on my students telling ghost stories– / A headless woman rocks in a chair in a patient room.” Of course, the reader may be reminded of their own heart-breaking and eerie memories of horror. Facing the dead, the speaker is a chaperone at summer camp and curiously asks her class if anyone has seen a decapitated body. The terror comes to life as she hears about a missing girl in the news, gazes at med school cadavers, and imagines a boatman carrying a lantern and oar to ferry souls. The poem series, “Clinical Trial: Human with Wings,” is measured in days and collectively sets the tone to describe the very dark mourning that she feels. On Day 203, she details her mere lonely, quiet peace in “The sound of a shadow, of a passing / cloud” during the gray of twilight. The speaker reflects on loss and death in “I pray before their walk / to the death chamber” on Day 91. She also develops the pastoral setting of being outdoors with birds in “I’m waiting for the last / of the cuckoos, the moment when its fulcrum / rests in the dark” on Day 271. Robertson uses carefully chosen diction like “hermetic prayer” to further impart the voice of a survivor who undergoes isolation in pain with the mere hope that life will get better.

Surgical Wing shares pain, suffering, loss, and death in a tragic life and gives hope for restoring peace. Robertson’s poems are lyrical and genuinely well-crafted. A survivor who has ever been left feeling broken will connect to the narrative. The strength found amidst misery is truly admirable. Every poem is captivating as Robertson teaches us to live through it.

Samantha Seto graduated with a B.A. as a Writing Seminars major and History of Art minor at the Johns Hopkins University. She has published in many journals including Ceremony, Soul Fountain, Scarlet Leaf Review, Breadcrumbs, and Chicago Literati. She lives with her cat in Washington, D.C.