Ultimately
Unslaked
Review: Quench, by Amy Orazio
CW Books, 2018, 101 pp. $15.95
by Nancy E Wright
Quench, by Amy Orazio, exposes, examines,
and ultimately slakes the thirst of longing at first drop by drop, then with
increasingly steadier flow, though never to the point of saturation. This
collection, the poet’s first, guides the reader through distinct and disparate
spaces—desert, city, harbor, and headwater—from the reader’s spiritual aridity
to enlightenment through recognition and acceptance of the inseparability of
body and spirit.
Following the Table of Contents but
prior to the first poem is the poem, “Stone Would be Water,” by Samuel Menashe,
the final five lines of which are:
Who makes fountains
Spring from flint
Who dares
tell
One
thirsting
There’s a
well
Quench is the well of which Orazio dares
to tell us. Four sections comprise the
collection: they are “Desert,” “City,” “Harbor,” and “Headwater.” In all sections the poems consist of
relatively short lines, with the majority of the poems no more than one
strophe. The effect is to suspend the reader between yearning and fulfillment,
and most of all to recognize the depths and details of that yearning with each
poem. “Exit Scene,” the first poem of the section “Desert,” and of the
collection, speaks of a place “Where the amber sings to dark/ darkness rings,”
thus initiating the reader’s pilgrimage at nightfall rather than at the more
predictable sunrise. The third poem, “By
This I Mean,” echoes Menashe’s stones in the aforementioned poem with the statement
“stones do right/ before seeing, asking/ help and what/are you thirsty
for?” The poems, “Early Ash” and
“Miracle,” that follow refer respectively to Good Friday and Passover, the
latter with the line, “I read Exodus by George Oppen. So I was hoping to see.” Yet another biblical reference occurs in
“Past the Brook,” the second strophe of which states:
The
widow has her own song
she is
setting supper
but her
bread is gone
can you pray
for oil?
The final strophe, however,
reverses the scenario with the statement, “I need oil to pray/ to unearth these
desert tricks.” As the reader nears the
end of the first section, these lines evoke the words of the Old Testament
prophet Elijah to the widow that the oil will not run out until God sends rain;
at the same time, the desert—and metaphorically the desert of one’s
yearning—replaces the prayer for oil with the need for oil as a prerequisite to
prayer. Thus the poem’s speaker dares to question—indeed perhaps even to
deny—the power of faith in the absence of evidence. For the speaker, proof is the prerequisite to
belief. Yet so often proof itself is
elusive, hence those who yearn for it remain thirsty.
“Of
Angels,” the opening poem of the second section, “City,” contrasts sharply with
the introduction to “Desert.” Instead of nightfall, a “circle of light” carries
the speaker to the aqueduct, to an artificial channel for transporting water,
which the speaker needs in order to survive.
Then,
I
asked for this shroud
for this
city in me
to be laid
bare.
Succeeding poems-- “Is Thirsting
Seeing,” in which the last line is ‘the new son sings,” “Incarnate,” and
“Transfigure,” speak of birth and
renewal in process, and of hope, as expressed in “Sink:”
when
the sun sinks low
bruising the sky
beautiful
can be a
troubling word
I still
believe in it though
like angels
who wear
faces
Seeing beauty certainly can quench
our own thirst for it; yet beauty and pain are so often companions, like the
sun setting on a day with so much yet unfinished, with so many still thirsty.
“Harbor,”
the shortest of the four sections, brings the reader closer to sources of
actual and spiritual water with poems such as “Cargo,” “Reservoir,” “Rinse,”
and “Remain,” with the last of these stating “There is a jar where I keep the
sea/ when it shuts off its sounds.”
Still, the ultimate arrival at the proverbial well occurs, if it occurs
at all, only in the final section, “Headwater,” and only when loss opens space,
as spoken in the section’s opening poem, “Thin Places:”
C-shaped
section of a river
for
bending
or laying
when loss
makes room for
what happens at the water’s side.”
If
a headwater is a tributary portion of a river close to its source, then the
beginning of quenching spiritual thirst is the space created by undoing,
expressed in the section’s poems such as “Unhinge,” and “In Between,” which
ends with the lines “How good does it feel / to unsee.”
Moreover, just as in the previous
section the speaker needs oil in order to pray, in “There You Are,” the speaker
is able to recognize that for which she thirsts only when she is able to
drink. The spiritual thirst is
inextricably at one with the body, as espoused in “Water to Live Water to Die,”
“Except that--/ this is not a metaphysical choice / this is gut.” Ultimately, as the “Ripening,” the last poem
in the collection states, “water is the prayer/ ready enough to be sung.”
Throughout
the collection the sparseness of lines and the near absence of punctuation give
the reader simultaneous clarity and confusion. Images of “magnets in
green-violet ears / hover where north and east / are unzipped as a ribcage”
(“Faults Are Present”), “six wings black against a sherbet sky” (“Backlit,”),
“Sunday’s head is heavy / already leathering” (“Sabbath), and “The stars are
drowning too / a deep hum at midnight / thick on our tongues:” (“In
Between”) engage the senses; yet the
pictures are neither clear nor situated in context. Rather than analyze to understand, however,
the structure of these poems somehow invites—indeed almost compels---the reader
to release understanding and instead journey deeply into the caverns of one’s
own longings and, once exploring that emptiness, find the path to filling the
vacuum. Nevertheless, unlike some poetry
that seeks to satisfy, Quench dares
not satiate completely, but rather leaves that task to the reader. Yet the poet reminds us that this freedom,
this autonomy the reader has to quench or not to quench, is an innate part of
the inevitable continuum of longing, simply by virtue of the fact that we are
human, and that we are body and spirit inextricably joined. Thus this inevitable, inescapable thirst
itself becomes the source of its own quenching.
