Looking Up and Other Dangers: A Review of Corey Van Landingham's LOVE LETTER TO WHO OWNS THE HEAVENS

In her stunning second poetry collection, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, Corey Van Landingham asks us to look and look again at the cyclical tragedy of war. Her richly layered and intricate poems use modern settings and relationships as stages for pageantries of desire and dominance, encounter and estrangement. In them, she reflects on the disconnect people experience when they view others, objects, and events from a distance. Much like the remove many may feel in regard to the drone, the primary subject of the book.

Throughout the collection, Van Landingham chooses a lens of exposure and exhibition, both of her speakers and the others they encounter in the poems. Rather than launch a removed observational critique, Van Landingham seems to situate herself within the mess. She introduces herself in relation to the drone (“In the Year of No Sleep”):

Long nights I would… watch the simulated
stock ticker make senseless
money for people I will never
see. Across the country men
make invisible machines…

The stock market’s steadiness, its business as usual, is contrasted with the abrupt destruction of a targeted drone attack. It happens, life goes on. Later a similar contrast is made in “Recessional," where Van Landingham describes a wedding in detail:

and not one of us thinks what we look like
from above, nor of
the eleven-vehicle wedding procession
delivering the newlyweds
to the groom’s remote village…
One man looks up.
We know the rest from headlines.

And it costs us nothing, Van Landingham seems to say. Too easy. Too easy to put away from sight and memory. It happens. Even when we know about it, we move on.

I think the brilliance of these poems is they offer different lenses for us to look through— to keep exploring and perhaps better understand the human impulses behind desire and destruction. It’s interesting to note that most characters in the poems are innocent bystanders, observers of art, at a distance from war—a daughter of her deceased father (“Elegy”), a teacher of her students (“In the Year of No Sleep”), young girls of the mysterious antics of unruly boys (“Field Trip," “The Goodly Creatures of Shady Grove”). In “Love Letter to the President,” we learn the senate has “quietly stripped a provision to an intelligence bill” which would have required the president to make public the number of people killed or injured. The speaker’s outrage takes a darkly humorous turn, offering an I’ll show you mine if you show me yours—the number of boys she made out with as a teenager for the number of people the government injured or killed.

The poems are often ekphrastic, directly responding to masterpieces about war. In “Love Letter to Nike Alighting on a Warship,” the drone is likened to a famous statue (Winged Victory of Samothrace)—“ears stripped, mouthless—Good Girl! Broken Goddess!”; Van Landingham quotes Dickinson equating sleeping with “ignorance and error”; relates how at night the drones must still land on the ground. They almost seem animal, like they need rest too. And men use their hands to clean their wings. There’s more complicity in this recognition, some of the distance removed. Though their destruction is remote, the drones still need care. Human hands must still perform their maintenance and operation: “Stand back, a docent / warned me then. You’re getting, he said, too close to her.” There’s distance and yet proximity again, this time alluding to the speaker’s closeness to the statue, and also to something truer and deeper than history’s celebratory tales of dominance and defeat.

Van Landingham seems to be exploring the space between us—our potential for creation as well as destruction. In every poem, beauty is juxtaposed alongside cruelty. In “The Goodly Creatures of Shady Grove,” Van Landingham references Miranda in The Tempest in order to highlight humanity’s potential for naïveté, as well as our own responsibility to see what’s in front of us. Young girls watch the spectacle of boys jumping off a bridge: “In the self-same space as wanting, cruelty is born”—one boy catches a fish with his shirt and then beats it against concrete: “He wants the other boys / to see the girls see what his hands can do.” Even children are capable of cruelty and can recognize when something is kind or not. Even children may be swayed by the desire to be desired. Misguided in so many ways.

How do we navigate this space between us when it holds such potential for love and destruction? Many poems explore the dynamics of a couple or perhaps couples, layered with references to historical divides: an ill-fated pair encounter history and natural boundaries on a road trip in the “Great Continental Divide;” a long-distance lover reflects on differences in weather between the two coasts and the seeming impermanence of love (“On a Morning Where Our Weather is 60 Degrees Different”). The author seems to be saying that there are natural distances that happen between man—our coming together, our moving apart. And there are ways to bridge that divide, means of connection. In “Transcontinental Telephone Line,” a long distance couple use phones to bridge the distance, yet:  

Eleven days after the line was finally
finished, Franz and Sophie were shot in Serbia
and the world was dark for four more years.

Technology brings light yet also ushers in darkness. Are we better for being able to talk across miles, where our words are no longer private? To be located by satellite where a drone can snuff out human life at any instant?

“Elegy for the Sext” contrasts a personal moment of sexting with other historical moments—the first image from a comet, the Berlin Wall broken down, how one can own a graffitied piece of the wall: “It is true that, once the body becomes fixed, it is too much itself.” She seems to be speaking to the human drive to capture, possess, and objectify moments in time—whether an intimate picture of a body, a (literally) concrete piece of history, or a photo of something we would never normally see, if not for technology: “Once the body becomes a downloadable thing, is it true?” Are we better for seeing, knowing, capturing these images, or lessened? This poem leads us into a series of poems written in response to an art exhibit depicting scenes from the Civil War.

In “Cyclorama,” Van Landingham plays with line length and page formatting to describe her own and other visitors’ perspectives and responses to the Gettysburg Cyclorama: “We, astonished readers of history, lean forward. But / the thick railing holds us back. Denies the moment.”

Art is a way into the past, yet still, we find ourselves held back from war’s reality in so many ways. The line between entertainment, ideology and education is so easily blurred. Visitors’s words make for some poignant moments:

I never could have
done it, march across, like, a wide-open field…
No, that one’s Little Round Top.
Where we ate our lunch.

The author then interjects surprising insight into the human condition:

The sold-out
showings prove this—in Atlanta and Pyongyang,
in the Kunstmuseum Thun and Berlin, Ohio—
how we have in us a taste for beauty and for
terror.

In “Love Letter to MQ-1C Gray Eagle,” the speaker addresses the drone by name, alludes to a deeper knowing of this new form of warfare. She describes being seen doing simple innocent things like picking a fig from a tree and eating it, like “lovers / consume things, in the moment, making the flies jealous,” comparing how quick and complete the drone destroys people. “We could get on like this, at a distance,” she says, alluding to her former poems about long-distance lovers, the ways technology allows the lovers to see and be intimate with each other: "I could pretend / to see you. I could flash you my mediocre breasts.” Again, the theme of exhibition and shame—she confesses feeding moths to her cats and then crying after: “I’m often / sorry about what I do, even if I don’t stop my actions.”

The author understands here that we all fall short of our better intentions. We can recognize our actions as wrong and still not stop. The last line of the poem is particularly striking:

If you require no hands and I require no
privacy, aren’t we destined to be less human together in the dark?

Van Landingham raises so many questions in her poems, none of which have neat or simple answers. Perhaps in the looking and looking again, in the reflecting and bringing these matters to light, we might still reclaim what slowly and surely is being lost.