Number 298
Fall 2006

Between Worlds
HANNAH STEIN
Copyright © 2006 Poetry Flash

HINGE, by Kathleen Lynch, Black Zinnias, San Francisco, 2006, 94 pages, paper $15.95, www.calartsandletters.org. Winner of the Black Zinnias Poetry Book Award 2004, judged by Richard Jones.

The extremist terms of our popular and political habitat often impose a strict, one-sided separation: good/evil, doubt/certitude, security/terror. Yet experience can be understood deeply only through an imagery that permits synthesis. Open and free-ranging thought may shove the latitudes of possibility far apart. At the still point, in the active image-making mind, they meet, and creativity thrives.
The eponymous device of the hinge has given Kathleen Lynch her theme for this remarkable first collection, connecting the worlds of dream and reality, dementia and lucidity, virtue and vice. Her poetry leads a reader between worlds, bringing the disparate together while at the same time suggesting degrees of divergence.
Key to entering Lynch’s complex terrain is a poem early in the book, “Bent Air.” A child walking with her father in summer wonders why air “at the fading point of the street / on a scorched day . . . wavered / like water rising up.” The father, who “knew things that fathers know” relates the common phenomenon to souls of the saved rising to heaven, and the black spots on the asphalt to those of the damned. Later in her life the narrator has learned to reject that dichotomy:

A brief celebration of the language in this book, this poem, these stanzas, is essential at this point. “A shimmer like water / climbed air,” “the sun gave full // scald” (as well as the brilliant stanza break) are the kinds of expression that exhilarate a reader throughout the collection.
The sense of “worlds dissolving” informs much of Lynch’s work, and along with those worlds go boundaries, now displaced by linkages. Any categorical distinction between the “saved” and the “damned,” for instance, has vanished in the compassion felt in poems such as “Everyone in Your Dreams Is You,” beginning:

While never specified beyond the one allusion in “Bent Air” (and in its epigraph from Dickinson), the “hinge” trope colors the book’s mood with a frequent fusion of tragedy and comedy, vulnerability and daring, often all in the same poem. In the extraordinary vision called “Anomaly,” whose agonizing premise is that of a twin sister joined skull to sternum with the narrator, whatever the fantasy or reality that may have engendered the poem is irrelevant; Lynch uses the symbol as a catalyst of both destructive and generative potential, as a connection between worlds:

Nowhere is the empathic tone of many of these poems more powerfully felt than at the beginning of Part II. “The Leaving” inhabits the fading mind of a man probably old, certainly ill, who knows only one thing: that he can no longer make sense of the world around him. Lynch’s insights are devastatingly sure, and tell us more about infirmity than any medical tome. It’s hard not to quote the full poem, but here is a telling excerpt:

The imaginative vision with which the poem ends opens to a touching, highly original perception:

In two poems that follow this one, “Search Party,” and “After the Search,” the poet heightens the reader’s sense of the pathos of a disabled intellect.
It must be said that Kathleen Lynch’s depths of wisdom and humanity are far from the full story. With her wry comic gift, she is also a witty and a very funny poet, with sassy asides that by example invite readers not to take themselves too seriously. Her brilliant signature poem How to Build an Owl, alive with compassion for all species, derives part of its complex impact from the punch-line: “gently pry open its beak / and whisper into it: mouse.” Whisper into its beak, not its ear; whisper mouse! What marvelous invention.
Probably the most exuberant poem in the collection is “Soaps Fan.” This jeu d’esprit rollicks to higher and higher peaks of absurdity (absurd unless one is of course a soaps fan). A deft turn near the end transforms the poet-narrator herself into one of the characters, and subtly reminds readers, without mentioning the title by name, that the turn of a pin can close or open the door between the worlds of safety and hazard.
Ambiguity as well as warmth and gentle humor tinges several “family” poems. “Chicken in the Snow” juxtaposes the unpredictable with an aunt’s casual slaughter of a bird for a meal. In “The Secret,” the same aunt takes a shower with an unsettled young niece whose modest mother had always dressed “in the tent / of her long flannel gown.” The poet’s mother makes several appearances throughout the book. One in particular, “Yard Work,” embraces much of what this book is about—the hinge between the worlds of promise and despair:

In spite of some unevenness in the choice of poems in the last section, this is a distinguished book, in the range of subjects and the beauty and exactitude of Lynch’s thought and language. But beauty and precision are not the sum total of what makes poems important, and I believe Hinge is that: a book by a generous, daring spirit who takes on the challenge of traveling between the world as given and that other one, fraught with doubt and peril, beyond the scrim of certainty.

Hannah Stein is the author of Earthlight and Greatest Hits, 1981-2004, from the Pudding House chapbook series. She lives in Davis, California.