In Lynne Knight’s 2009 book of poems, Again, all that’s left of a barn is a door, leaning on a tree, opening to and closing on nothing. In a dream, an unrequited love morphs into cartoon, draining all the heat out of desire. A farmer is drunk by mid-morning, unable to name the unsettled feeling that gnaws at him. Flowers, invisible at night, make their presence known by their uncanny sounds, while trees knock at the back wall of the house, threatening to puncture holes in the sky. “Whatever is not eaten by small foragers turns to dust then less than dust…” Knight’s poems are quiet boning knives that deftly separate out the gist of a longing or a tension or a hope or a question, leaving nothing extraneous.

There is a beautiful conflict in Again. On one hand is the world of ideals, which we attempt to capture and surround ourselves with: hanging them as paintings on our walls, building them as houses, telling them as morals or fairy tales, making little snowglobes of ourselves and each other. On the other hand is the natural tendency of all things to escape their confines, to throw off harnesses, to rot, to decay, to bloom, to outgrow. With a startlingly frank and nimble voice, Knight crewels her poems out of lines of smoke and memory: carriages emerge from mist, women yearn for a clear fate while attempting to escape the one inherited, the ideas of a perfect life touch the realities of it and burst into flame. Unlike the bounded frame of the paintings and photographs Knight draws inspiration from, her poems burn, spill, crush, and flare out of those confines, revealing that the moment you limit the view, you are immediately haunted by what it does not contain.

What is most compelling and rewarding about Again, is that Knight isn’t satisfied with destruction or despair. This isn’t a book about breaking things apart and leaving the reader stranded amidst the smoking ruins. What Knight offers is a glimpse of how flux and restlessness are the essence of vitality. In poem after poem, she effortlessly describes the world not as a place where we wander amongst inanimate objects, but as a shifting landscape of connectedness, where the living, inhabiting force flits, sometimes eerily, sometimes playfully, from one thing to another. In Knight’s poems, a moored boat is a live thing, “pressing its shadow at the water/ like a sketch begun, begun again,” and “moonlight spill(s) like cloth inside the window.” Desire, hope and landscape constantly shift with “that watery sense of everything changing/ but staying the same.”

Again is a deceptively easy read: the gentle, uncluttered language disguises its force. Knight has tapped into a shared restlessness brought on by a world so much confused by seeing it in terms of representations: the television screen, the canvas, the idea of love, the fairy tales and stories we are given as illustrations of what to expect from life. But in these lines, it is enough that the heart rushes for little things, that “the afternoon… will be remembered for no reason but the moment light began to pour over the body, all over the body, like a song it thought forgotten.”

Again
by Lynne Knight (89 pages/ Sixteen Rivers Press, 2009)

reviewed by LJ Moore editor.moore(at)gmail(dot)com