The Drowning House by John Sibley Williams Review by Shannon K. Winston
The Drowning House by John Sibley Williams
Review by Shannon K. Winston
Elixir Press
102 pages
publication date: 01/01/2022
ISBN: 9781932418781
Poetry as History in John Sibley Williams’s The Drowning House
The past lurks where we least expect it: behind doors, under baseboards, in a house’s very foundation. A house is a sanctuary, but its walls also keep others out. “To house” means to shelter, but who and what we shelter is predicated on exclusion. Nor do we get to choose everything or everyone we shelter. Houses are riddled with ghosts, but what if we are housing ghosts we are not prepared to confront? This is one of the central questions haunting John Sibley Williams’s spectacular poetry collection, The Drowning House, whose title becomes a metaphor for America’s dark and complex past. In the poem, “My American Ghost,”—which is also the name of one of the collection’s three sections—the speaker states: “I don’t think we’re ready/ just yet to see our own ghosts” (31). And yet, the ghosts in The Drowning House confront its speakers and readers regardless of whether or not we are prepared. These ghosts include America’s history of systemic racism, domestic violence, and the havoc wreaked by climate change as well as the crucial importance of indigenous histories in shaping the American landscape–both literally and metaphorically.
Just as the figure of the house is central to Williams’s collection, so too is the concept of “drowning,” which stages a sense of precariousness and urgency. Drowning is used both literally and metaphorically. In the eponymous poem, there is an actual flood, where the “neighbor’s house, vanishes,” the cellar floods, and the speaker states: “I can witness// our home, consuming and being consumed” (45). Later, “The Wolves Have Done Their Worst” takes up the theme of flooding and states: “if//there is any more rain the river will swallow the house/ for good this time” (76). Not only do these lines highlight the importance of water to the collection, but they also stage an important ambiguity between flooding and drowning. Flooding happens to landscapes, houses, and non-sentient beings. Drowning, however, is what happens to sentient beings–including people and animals. The house, however, is drowning, which suggests that it too feels. It both acts and is acted upon. To cite “The Drowning House,” the house is both “consuming” and “being consumed” (45). Yet, in “The Wolves Have Done Their Worst,” the river is being personified as “swallow[ing]” the house” (76). The house thus becomes a central character in the collection, a family member with its own persona.
In addition to the house, The Drowning House takes on many different historical, mythological, figures, including Edward Hopper, Prometheus, Emmett Till, and Rosa Parks. The Drowning House also features the children of future generations, immigrants, and “the demons exorcised, returning every/ evening in the familiar form of a father’s // fist” (35). The familiar and unfamiliar, even horrific, often convene in the home’s most intimate spaces. At the same time, this violence bleeds into the landscape surrounding the home, especially within the context of hunting culture. Thus, the poem “Encroachment” begins: “Yes, any evening field, where deer thank the wolves/for diverting the hunter’s love; whatever it means to be/ lesser prey–we’ll take it” (12). Through sparse use of understatement, these lines comment on the continual struggle to survive and not to be “lesser prey.” While they speak to the ways in which humans enact violence on nature, one cannot help but read them as metaphors for the ways in which the social world, too, creates hierarchies defined by hunter-prey dynamics.
One of the most impressive feats of The Drowning House is its capacious, panoramic view of an America defined by plurality, as the title of the poem, “Americanisms” (italics in title mine) makes clear. Yet, this multiplicity is defined by “disharmony” (10) and “[e]veryone walking bitterly on their mouths” (10). Within this context, the house contains fractious dynamics and a sense that everyone is culpable, which the poem acknowledges in the following lines:
Perhaps the darkness of the house can
hold it all together. An unarmed sky heavy
with promises cracks open into another
storm. The bars are all 27-4 now. How
when we say the thing that’s wrong with
this country, the forgive me is implied (11).
Here as elsewhere, The Drowning House engages with what is not directly stated or, to quote the poem, “implied” (11). Indeed, tropes of silence and the unsayable are central in this collection. America’s past is inseparable from its people. No one is absolved. With nuance, Williams takes on the theme of personal responsibility by engaging with different kinds of paradoxes. For example, the speaker in the poem that opens the collection begins not with a house, but with the ground and the soil on which lives are made and in which they are buried. The speaker asserts: “In the beginning the bodies were too soft//& the land too hard. Or the other way around” (1). Williams plays with chronology and linearity here, by presenting two equally viable beginnings. The “or” disrupts a singular, linear narrative to engage multiple ways of seeing and narrating the past. At the same time, what is not seen is equally important, as in a poem like “The Dead Just Need to Be Seen. Not Forgiven,” which tells the story of “[t]hat old man in the photo our family never talks about, / best known for tracking runaway slaves” (8). Just a few lines later, the poem describes the old man’s “empty chair at the table” (ibid) and his absence, which haunts the family and the house.
With a deft lyricism and keen sense of craft, Williams makes use of each word and each line break to defamiliarize the reader’s world—or, in the case of this poem, our own backyard—to jolt us into awareness of the violence that undergirds our everyday. “Pantomime” best exemplifies this. It begins:
Outside the sheets are pulling
back together into bodies.
The wind confuses sway
with dance (5).
Here, we are in the domestic sphere with the image of sheets drying on a line, but this image is immediately unsettled as the sheets form ghost-like bodies that begin to dance. The wind’s confusion creates ambiguity around what we think we see and know. The introduction of smoke in the final couplets heightens this uncertainty:
The fields are smoke
& through the smoke
figures materialize.
Deer that might be
mothers or sisters, gutshot,
looking for a slice of shadow
to die in. So many hanging trees
we confuse with men (5-6).
Just as the poem opens with the wind’s confusions, it ends with the smoky air, which heightens our confusion about what is clearly visible. The poem explicitly circles back to the word “confusion” when it describes our confusion of hanging trees with men—an image that recalls nooses and violence against black bodies. While we confuse hanging trees with men, the “gutshot” deer are a reminder of the cruelty we inflict on other animals and nature. The detail that the deer “might be/mothers or sisters” opens up a space of empathy in which the deer might not be so different from us. Like contiguous rooms in a house, these violences exist side-by-side and reveal the many intersectional narratives comprising our past.
The Drowning House offers its readers a highly original series of poems that bring two figures, not commonly brought together, into conversation with one another. A few of the pairings include Edward Hopper and Emmett Till, Prometheus and Trayvon Martin, and Rosa Parks and Banksy. To paraphrase Williams’s explanation of the series, he paired these figures to create a poem that captures both of their stories (click here to hear more). In so doing, he “casts [both] stories into a different mold” (Youtube video). The effect is remarkable: Williams creates resonances between narratives that traverse time and space. In “Emmett Till//Edward Hopper,” for example: “In your mouth, a thousand unpainted churches–/steeples snapped off like baby teeth in an apple” (7). Likening unpainted churches to baby teeth is marvelously original and conjures a body, one of the poem’s central foci as it interrogates the differential treatment of black and white bodies. At the same time, these lines reference Hopper’s many paintings of churches. Later, too, Williams writes: “All sorts of women sit on the knife-edge / of a bed, half-naked” (ibid), another dominant motif in Hopper’s work. Hopper’s figure of an alienated woman sitting on her bed becomes the turning point to Emmett Till’s story. The history of Till’s death helps contextualize the poem’s commentary that “[a]ll sorts of men are tossed / over bridges after whistling a little tune” (7). Through understatement and a sparse tone, Williams critiques racism because clearly not all men are tossed over bridges for such an alleged offense. The earlier line, “Truth is married to the surface/ of things” (7), brings together Till and Hopper’s stories by referencing the false allegations against Till and the alienation and loneliness Hopper captures among the white community in his paintings. “Emmett Till//Edward Hopper” creates a mirror-effect whereby Hopper’s story is refracted through Till’s and vice versa. Crucially, this refraction is not a collapsing of the two stories but a recontextualization that allows readers to understand the ways in which white silence (staged in Hopper paintings) is inextricably linked to violence against black communities.
The Drowning House takes on ethical questions about how we, as Americans and as the readers of this collection, relate to personal and collective histories, with a keen, exacting eye anchored in the everyday. The past is made of the most precise details, including a “tiny animal bones strung together into trinkets” (1), “that shuttered motel//behind your eyes./ Vacancy still pulsing//neon red into night” (49), and “[a] miniature dollhouse world, prematurely on fire” (61). Williams’s use of imagery estranges the world in order to see it anew. In the eponymous poem, plastic deer are washed away by the rain, which creates the possibility that actual deer will return. Floods are also possibilities for rebirth: they wash away artificial things and rewild the natural world. Even as the house is drowning, water seems to give new life. Yet, the intertwining of nature and culture and past and present is never reducible to uncomplicated hope or straightforward doom. Rather, The Drowning House is an exquisite enactment of the poetic power to re-narrate and recontextualize history’s ebb and flow on the local, personal, and national levels. Williams attends to the beauties and tragedies of the American experience, dwelling with its complexity and irreducibility.
John Sibley Williams is the author of Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Book Award, 2021), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2021), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. He has also served as editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013). https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com/
Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in RHINO Poetry, West Trestle Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com/
7 September 2022
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