Parabola Dreams
Silvia Scheibli and Alan Britt
Bitter Oleander Press
ISBN: 9780978633592

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          Though people rarely write of it in such terms, poetry is often a conversation that bends in several directions: between poet and reader, poet and subject, poet and poem’s addressee, poet and life, and even—perhaps especially—the poet and himself or herself. Rarely, though, does a collection feature a poet’s work in conversation with another poet.

          Such a conversation, however, is one of the many noteworthy things about Parabola Dreams, a duology of verse by Silvia Scheibli and Alan Britt, two poets whose work dances around, plays off, and finds inspiration in that of the other—a quality made even more remarkable by the fact that both poets’ work is quite different. Alone, their poems are sharp, glistening cuts of image, place, and memory, jewel-bright and knife-sharp; together, they are an unexpected clutch of gems, glimpses of a strange and colorful tide pool just before the waves call its mysteries back to their depths.

          Britt and Scheibli’s works are such strong complements, perhaps, because both poets have been identified with the Immanentist movement, a school of poetry in the US that saw its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, and which is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as its more well-known cousin surrealism—and indeed many other forms of “image-heavy” poetry. As an aside for those curious about this school, nearly all of my attempts to learn more about Immanentism—which, sadly, seems to have been neglected by both contemporary poets and scholars, if the dearth of Google hits is any indication—pointed back to both of these poets, working in tandem or separately. My best guess at explaining the movement, then, must rely on the definition of the word “immanent” from which it draws its name: inherent or, when said of God, perpetually sustaining and emanating through the universe.

          Of course, one of the themes that emanates throughout most world religions—and those most well-known in the West specifically—is the unknowability of that force called God, Creator, or any similar title. At best, humans are afforded glimpses of him/her/it at work. Scheibli’s poetry, in particular, seeks to capture and translate these images, often through contemplation of rainstorms, monsoons, or other instances of stark weather that have stirred up poetic and religious fervor since well before the Bronze Age. In translating the start of a rainstorm from atmosphere to page in “Instantly It Will Rain Again” (here reproduced in full), Scheibli shows this ineffable, unquantifiable force at play.

When it starts
           The dove’s lilac eyeliner
Will smear.

Shortly,
   Sand itself will bleed and
Ignite a
           Thousand candles.

But the rain’s face will
       remain forever invisible.

Except that somewhere,
       it is on the verge
of being recognized.

When I looked at the lizard’s
         yellow eye
         just now

I felt hard drops
             the second his collar
         disappeared in the brown skin
Of a stone.

The stone darkened -
         The air breathed much lighter.

          As a fellow Floridian who is, even now, pausing to look through my office window at a lowering June sky, the next in a succession of torrential rainstorms that are the hallmark of this month, I am well-acquainted with the divinity of such events. The trembling of air before the first drops speckle the skin of anoles and geckos; the sigh of air and earth as stones and pavement speckle, then darken, with drops. The qualia of such moments make them not only deeply spiritual experiences, but often immeasurable ones. Through glistening, haiku-like images that carve to the look and feel of the situation, Scheibli’s work in this poem and others, such as “Been Ironing All Day,” “On the First Day of Monsoon Season,” and “Waiting for Rain—with Duane Locke’s ‘sonic texture of words’” come jarringly close to glimpsing the ever-moving electrons of the divine.

          Britt’s work, by comparison and contrast, attempts not just to be, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson (who would have loved both poets’ work, I am sure), “a transparent eyeball” recording the divine, but to also translate it into real-world terms—which, by necessity, often brings his poetry into the realm of the political. If Schheibli is Emerson, then Britt is William Blake whose monumental, yet outlaw verse, visions, and prophecies railed against the injustices of his time. In fact, Blake makes an appearance in “Wild Parakeets of Florida,” in which Britt touches upon modern genocides, the AIDS crisis, and the “bread and circuses” mentality that currently dominates US thinking.

This can’t be why Blake
parted the Red Sea.

I’m telling you,
Blake was an escaped convict
from the 18th Century
with nowhere else to go.

          Indeed, Britt’s more political glimpses at the divine seem to make him, like many poets who have spoken out against government abuses and excesses, a bit of an intellectual and artistic outlaw—“an escaped convict,” if you will. And like Blake before him, the political and the spiritual meet in “In Love with the Universe,” my favorite of his poems in this volume (here reproduced in full). Others that stuck in my mind like thistles are “Listening to Lila Downs,” “Daisy Jopling Plays the Classics,” and “Spanish Wine in Early Summer” (indeed, Britt’s interests in music and wine also serve as metaphysical conceits to reveal deeper thoughts about the divine and the world it inhabits).

I need to back down
this ladder,
this extension ladder leaning
against a yellow grapefruit tree
sheltered by the dirty green hair
of Spanish moss dripping
from Tampa pines.

Why I need to back down
remains a mystery.

But I’ll back down just the same
if you promise
to uphold your end
of the bargain.

No more vengeful wars,
and no more former hostages
sporting purple hearts
while escorting grieving First Ladies
who to this day mistrust the wild
but steady hands
of delinquent poets
still in love with the universe.

          Both full poems are representative of both poets’ work, and serve not only as excellent spiritual and poetic kin, but as sharp contrasts. Scheibli’s lines and stanzas are brief, glimmering, entirely imagistic, concerned with the bird-flight moment of human experience; Britt’s stanzas are longer, denser in word count and construction, and use the experience of an image or moment to touch, shape, and then expound upon a point that affects and colors human experience in far more visible ways than the divine that nonetheless hovers in the background.

          Parabola Dreams is not only an engrossing look at the output of members of a neglected school of poetry, but also an engaging, eye-opening study of the balance between the earthly and the divine. As I hinted at before, readers and poets who find much to like in the Transcendentalist poets and the work of William Blake and his descendants will find much to love about this book. So too will poets who were enraptured by the New York School and by nearly any aspect of that ever-telescoping movement most commonly dubbed “surrealism.”


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