Casting Ourselves Across Edges: A Review of The Thicket by Kasey Jueds

The Thicket by Kasey Jueds (University of Pittsburg Press, 2021). 72 pages. $18.

In the spring of 2020, the once sharp line between my work and home lives began to wiggle, and I watched the season slowly unfold from my window while I tapped away at my keyboard. Over a period of weeks, stems of purple-flowered raspberry stretched and twisted from the woods’ margin, eventually forming a notch sturdy enough for a pair of newly-arrived chestnut-sided warblers to begin weaving their nest of grass and bark, which they secured with spider silk. Then as spring shaded into summer, the birds and their eggs—then babies—became obscured by greenery, hidden from my attention. I thought about their long journey from the Yucatán Peninsula and how, unbeknownst to me over the preceding Vermont winter, their future home had been preparing to grow up from the ground just in time to meet them.

Reading The Thicket, poet Kasey Jueds’s second full-length collection, brought this, well, thicket, vividly back into my mind, concerned as many of its poems are with the mutability of places and objects—their meanings, purposes, forms, and even boundaries—and their clandestine lives lived out of view.  

The first few lines of the opening poem, “The Silo,” establish this theme immediately, the speaker asking the abandoned structure:

Who keeps your secrets

now?—now that the grain you kept

to feed the winter herd

is gone, the cows long gone

from the stalls where not even

their ghosts shift in the cold-

sealed dim and imagine

pasture.

But though the building’s intended purpose is no longer being fulfilled, Jueds reveals others, such as a perch for sparrows to “trace / their momentary outlines / against the flux of sky.” Then the middle third of the poem abruptly shifts the line of inquiry:

Do you know that sometimes

I hear my lover in another

room, and think for a moment

he is the one I told myself

I loved before, the one

who hurt me?

I was disoriented, if pleasantly surprised, by this swerve at first. Was the “you” invoked still the silo? But upon reading further into The Thicket and returning to this first poem again and again, I’ve come to ask, “why not?” In Jueds’s poems, places have weight, power, presence. They offer lessons, even if reluctantly, on occasion. I love the idea of an old silo as confidant, of a place—rather than a person—receiving one’s thoughts, memories, and confessions. Because places mean so much to us, why wouldn’t/shouldn’t/couldn’t they?

Later in the book’s first part (of three), “The Tool Shed” is also preoccupied with what once was, both physically and emotionally:

How can I explain the way

I kept coming back—to that box

of trapped shadows with its concrete

floor, its constant chill even

on the most blazing August days.

Chemical scents and residues persist long after pesticides and herbicides are removed, integral to the meaning the speaker is searching for in the memory, which the reader (or friend? partner?) is then invited into: “Now, I want to say / come back there with me, though every time I stepped / into that place I was alone.”

In writing about speaker presence in The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser observes that “Some poems tell us very little about the person behind the words, and concentrate instead on what is seen in the world beyond that speaker’s point of view. Other poems tell us very little about the world and tell us a great deal about the person portrayed by the words.” He later notes that “Successful poems often take advantage of several approaches, mixing [the personal with the objective].” This is an interesting point to consider when it comes to the broad category of quote-unquote nature poetry (and nature writing in general), in which some traditions treat the human interior and the exterior natural worlds as if they were indeed separate faders that the writer can choose to brighten or dim. As did the poems in Jueds’s first collection, Keeper, those in The Thicket feel kin instead to poetic traditions invested in dismantling that dichotomy.

Sometimes even the divisions between individual poems feel tenuous. Often a word, phrase, or image is handed forward from poem to poem like a baton. In “The Tool Shed,” Jueds offers “There is no away.” A few poems later, the first sentence of “Not All the Animals Sleep” flips it: “There is always an away” (see Whitman re: contradictions, etc. etc.). When I’m reading the book start-to-finish, this poem is a moment where Jueds’s themes form a nest-bearing node. It continues, possibly referencing either moving house or a vacation from frigid weather: “We’ve abandoned the house /to the frozen air no one / breathes…” Yet though the speaker departs, the poem stays where…

… the deer draw close

to graze the blades of grass left sheltered

near the walls’ remnant warmth—they circle

the house, drawing it into itself, they take

what has always been theirs.

The poem’s attention to object permanence then turns to impermanence, plunging into deep time: “Long / ago, and miles north of here, an island / vanished, slipped back into the lake / that birthed it.” It’s an abrupt spatial/temporal leap from the (beautifully rendered) image of “seedheads / of weeds stamped against the snow” that precedes it, made more abrupt by Jueds’s short line lengths, which give many of her poems a careful, halting quality. But the more I spend time with it, the more I register the ache in the gap between the quiet minutes in the poem’s first half and the millennia of landscape changes: “That island: how sudden / or not the blue took it back.” Then the poem closes:

                                                   Here

when the snow recedes, I can imagine

flowers might return, repeating

yellow, yellow. But how not to count

the days or hours till then: if

you will draw near, if you

will teach me—please, teach me this.

The longing in Jueds’s work, to me, emerges from not being able to encompass, witness, or comprehend everything at once—because of time, dislocation, or both. How can we hold onto the world’s incredible beauty at the same time as we understand it is fleeting? “Not All the Animals Sleep” doesn’t have an answer—it’s explicitly in search of one by its end—but it moves me to share in its entreaty: Please, teach me this, too.

There are many other connective threads in this collection—from fairy tales to birds, Japanese papermaking and craft to literal hedges and thickets, dusks, and other ecotones. Another is a series of five “Litany” poems sewn across Parts II and III, most organized around the repetition of a single word or short phrase, i.e. “given” in “Litany (Paulownia)” and “having” in “Litany (Over Eastern Washington).” These are some of my favorite poems in the book, perhaps because the anaphora meshes so well with the recursion of imagery. In “Litany (Boreal),” wind exposes the silver undersides of leaves, which in turn have been concealing a kingfisher. In “Litany (Easter)” we are “given / the old story to hold on our tongues: the one / of the stone, rolled away / from the tomb…” Both images are of something being revealed, whether presence or absence.

Though “Not All the Winds Have Names” is not titled as part of the litany series (calling back instead to “Not All the Animals Sleep”), every line begins with the word “body.” Imagery shared throughout the book features here as well, including the “still-tender skin limning the inner wrist,” “the harrowed field,” and “tracings of birds in air.” But rather than build up to it, the absence of this poem is revealed in the first two lines:

Body that has never made milk.

Body of unanswerable dark within.

The weight of this stanza is felt throughout the rest of the poem, through its shifts of warmth and chill, the implied flickering of a lamp’s wick, memory and forgetfulness, “sand clinging to the soles of shoes, carried away from waves, small roughness left in sheets, remember?” I do. Though not all of us share the same darknesses, how generous is the poet to bring us into the poem in this way, to contemplate how traces of the past and of place stay with us, for better or worse.

I find this generosity throughout The Thicket, the poems’ power accreting through familiarity and continuity, their constant searching, working, changing and being changed, that goes on even after I close the book.