Considered Slantwise: A Review of Joan Fiset's How It Was in Scotland

If you want to see the Pleiades in the night sky, you must not look at it directly or all you will see is a faint smudge. But shift your gaze a little one way or the other, and all seven stars become clear. Much the same approach works when reading the poems of Joan Fiset in How It Was in Scotland. If you try to meet them head on, you won’t see clearly. But look to the left or to the right… 

Paintings by Noah Saterstrom, which accompany Fiset’s poems and to which she responds—more often than not obliquely—in this hybrid collection are also best viewed from an angle. The paintings are renderings of photographs from Saterstrom’s family albums and, like Fiset’s poetry, seem somehow incomplete, not quite finished. Often the people’s faces are smeared, and the settings softened so that they feel familiar, but not entirely so. Together, the text and the visual work in a way that does not reveal the connection unless they are considered slantwise.

Take, for example, a two-line poem that appears about halfway through the book:

a man kept calling Lucinda
up and down the stairs

The painting that accompanies this couplet shows a young girl in a blue dress and a white apron standing outside near the corner of a red building. Behind her, the scene is a bleary landscape reminiscent, perhaps, of Kansas with what could be a grain elevator in the distance. Her face is featureless except for the suggestion of a mouth and eyes. She has a deep shadow behind her and is wearing red shoes. Is this Lucinda?

That sort of question, that sort of correspondence between image and language is central to our reading. Even if, as in the case above, there is not an evident relationship, the fact that each poem—save the last, which is a variation of the first—has been paired with a painting, that they present themselves in the same way each time—poem on the left, painting on the right—suggests we are meant to take them in together, in union, halves of a whole.

There is also a thread of a narrative in the volume, an interconnectedness, as if we are turning the pages of a family album and seeing scenes changed by time, recalling them barely. Fiset’s poems capture those relationships and, in their spare way reveal the meaning of the memory. Two poems in particular stand out as exemplars.

In one, a young man poses in the unnatural way high school graduates are twisted for their important portrait. He wears a jacket and tie and looks away from the camera. Fiset captures both this moment and the uncertainty of the boy’s future:

voices croon from across the river
he gathers stray language
inside his hands

should words approach
blue eyes close

to silence
like the room

In the other poem, she expresses the grief of a man in a gray suit, head bent and hands folded, looking at a grave:

later
hands held
below the minute
seconds
understand

Other images of grave sites and mourners prompt Fiset to additional musings on death and loss, while photos of families dressed in bright spring colors invoke thoughts of life, rebirth, joy. Next to a picture of a mother and three children, all dressed in red, she happily declares:

this is summer
this is years and years

over the lake
returns so blue

look together into it
dreaming the hummingbirds home

Two of the children in that painting appear again in other guises and, perhaps, at different ages, helping to stitch together the collection as a continuous but not necessarily linear history. In some instances, though, the history, the lineage, is mysterious, as if there were secrets the poet has discovered. A man standing next to his car outside of a motel looking at a boy who may be about to climb into the back seat or has just emerged is depicted in two lines

faint sketch of a man
rarely mentioned

leaving us to wonder if this is the man we’re looking at, and, if so, just who is he and why is he rarely mentioned?

The only named character in the book, Lucinda, makes a second appearance several pages after we initially meet her. She is dressed in the same outfit, but her hair is braided in this one, and she’s carrying a book. The dark shadow of her photographer can be seen on the wall next to her. As is the case in the first poem, this one raises more questions about the girl than provides answers and seems to hint at her being ill-suited for this place:

Lucinda’s thirst
lengthened out to a ruler
to measure the kitchen inch by inch
no one moved to wipe up the mess
no one said a single word

In an interview published in Tarpaulin Sky magazine, Fiset explains that her writing is oftentimes an unconscious process, one that “is capable of calling forth, translating, and transforming ‘news’ from the unconscious in relation to lived experience—what one witnesses externally as well as internally. When form and content become one a synthesis and integration have occurred that can shock us into a deeply satisfying crucial kind of knowing, a fierce recognition that, for me, often cannot be explained.”

By focusing her attention on the Saterstrom paintings, Fiset is forced to translate very specific lives and experiences which may seem somewhat counter to the unconscious approach she describes, and yet the poems that make up this collection reflect the synthesis of form and content that shock us into a fierce recognition. Just as we might see ourselves in the blurry images of a family photo, so, too, might we find something vaguely familiar in Fiset’s poems which, like whispers or snatches of overheard conversation, trigger our curiosity and memory. The strength of How It Was with Scotland is that the poet and the painter take us to places we think we remember but which are ultimately unknowable.

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