Field of View
A Review of Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher
In the series preface to Jessica Poli’s “Red Ocher,” Patricia Smith writes, “Good poetry should not leave you the same as when you came to it.” By that definition, Red Ocher succeeds brilliantly. Poli’s first full-length collection is a lyrical, elegiac contemplation of loss, yearning, and unrequited love, a slow burn of a book that will lodge itself inside you as lived memory.
“Balm,” the opening poem of Poli’s collection, begins: “It is morning, and in my arms/ another lamb is dying” (3). The poet physically places readers into the moment so effectively they can feel the lamb’s “short breath on my neck…” and “how her head falls against my chest/ as if to say: I trust you/ as much as one animal can trust another” (3).
Poli establishes the physical world with descriptive details and simultaneously pulls back the curtain to reveal the poet’s mind at work as she reflects on how she will later translate the scene into a poem. In so doing, she shifts the poem from a narrated experience into an ars poetica. Even as the lamb is dying, the speaker is searching for ways to reframe a disturbing experience, to make art out of “the shit/ blooming on my shirt like a flower” (3). While she thinks about cutting the lamb's throat, she grapples with how she will reshape that grisly act into a poem. She notes “the bright droplets of blood” (4), and shares she is “ashamed to say it – “but knows “that it would be beautiful” (4). In this way, she demonstrates the universal urge to make meaning out of our messy lives, especially when the situation is outside our control. Poli’s poetic impulse is to shape every painful impression and memory into a creative act.
Throughout the book, Poli brings memories so vividly to life that they begin to feel like our own. Through rich imagery and language, she emotionally and physically embeds her poems––and her readers–– in the lush, cyclical, and sometimes destructive landscape and lifestyle of farming, a life dependent on the vicissitudes of weather, repetitive chores, and hard work. She vividly creates a place that feels real even while the farm, the weather, and even the air take on the attributes of a living, breathing creature: “silos open their mouths/ like dark, dark fear…”(54). The “weather shifts, heaves its weight/ against the hedgerow. / The farm rises and falls/ like a chest.” (53). The speaker refers to, “...a farmhouse/blaring light in the middle of acres of night” (21), a “rooster hung with its throat cut” (24). She recalls “hay-smells” (26), and “chore light” (Page 6), and a stillness in which “a goat is bleating–/ a milkstone lodged/ in her udder” (7).
Many poems confront the pain of being rooted in a place that harbors shadows: the memories and ghosts of lost love. And yet, the collection is more expansive in its scope. Poli reminds us that “There are many ways of living. / One is with a hole inside of you that never gives/ or forgives. Another is to collect memories/ as if they’re shards of light in what is otherwise pitch dark” (60). These poems confront the uncomfortable crossroads of despair and loss and embody the speaker’s pain as she admits, “I wish I hadn’t looked closer, wish/ I didn’t have to look, / wish I’d never looked…”(41).
But there are also poems of beauty and hope in this collection. In “Ode to Seventh-Grade Girls,” Poli cuts through the cattery and cruelty of adolescent girls to pay homage to the feminine collective, “made of gristle/ and glitter, born carrying small funerals in their bellies.” Each girl is willing to “use her body as a shield” (35). Poli’s treatment of her subjects is never sentimental, and as such, the poem becomes a celebratory anthem for girl power that would win over even the most wizened crone-heart.
Poli is also a master at writing in form: the aubade, the ghazal, and especially the cento. In the eleven centos sprinkled throughout the collection, Poli carefully curates borrowed lines to craft poems that effectively round out the collection. The centos seamlessly blend into the themes established by the poems around them, both in tone and emotion. The titles alone provide a kind of road map through the book: “Forest Cento, “Firelight Cento,” “Transient Cento,” “Sorry Cento,” “Nowhere Cento,” and “Isolation Cento.”
In the title poem, “Red Ocher,” Poli offers stunning images, impressions, and memories that build tension and urgency. Something devastating has happened, but we are only given snippets of the aftermath: “Burying what’s left: of the dog, the bottle, the unsent letter. / A woman walks out the front door, carrying everything. / And the night remembers” (58). The changing syntax and fragmented sentences throughout the poem amplify the instability and danger: “To glance ghost. To taste gun. / To become what you found in the attic when you were young” (58).
Visions of violence, loss, and trauma are interspersed with questions that only deepen the mystery. But there are no answers here. We’ll never learn “What the wasp dragging its half-severed tail knows about sorrow” (57). The poem is an unsettling collage of blood clots, rope, wolves, snakes, graveyards, skeletons, and unsent letters. Things rot and fall apart, collapse and splinter, choke and bark. Even if we didn’t “see the blood in the snow” (Page 58), we understand that we’ll never find out what “the night remembers.” (Page 58). Because too much “is lost in the retelling.” (57).
Perhaps the most astonishing poem in the book is “Field of View,” a poem crafted almost entirely out of silences. It’s a story the reader must piece together from footnotes that refer to the blank space on the page – the narrative that isn’t there. In photography, a field of view describes what is visible, the observable area from a particular lens or perspective. In this remarkable poem, Poli captures the acuteness of loss by obliterating the entire field of view, giving us only glimpses of what might have once been there, clues to the mystery of what has gone missing. The poem succeeds in form – with the large swaths of white space followed by annotations– and in content. Each footnote or annotation functions autonomously as its poetic glimmer. Each one is a small poem, and yet, as they progress and accumulate, they begin to accrete power with every successive blank space.
As in the title poem, “Field of View” offers only fragments. And we can’t help but become invested in the search to understand what has gone missing. In that way, this poem captures the overarching theme of the entire book: loss, pervasive, unrelenting loss. Like the opening poem, the desire to find beauty, to make meaning out of absence. As a farmer-poet, Poli has lived closer to death than most of us. She offers us a glimpse into the universal attempt to come to terms with the temporal nature of our lives. Consider the last line of the last poem in the collection: “…I knew a dairy farmer once who, when a cow//was to be put down, would turn her out into the pasture/ one last time to watch the sun set. I wonder if all these animals look at the sky and see something I never will. // I think I could spend// my whole life trying to find it” (78).
This is where Poli leaves us – immersed in the search for answers to the unknowable mysteries of what it is to be human. Red Ocher is a transformative book that will stay with readers and leave them different than they were before.
Jessica Poli is a writer, editor, and educator living in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her debut poetry collection, Red Ocher (University of Arkansas Press), was selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. She is the author of four chapbooks, including Canyons (BatCat Press, 2018) and The Egg Mistress, which won the 2012 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, North American Review, and Poet Lore, among other places, and she has been the recipient of a Wilbur Gaffney Poetry Prize and a Vreeland Award for Poetry.
Along with Marco Abel and Timothy Schaffert, Poli co-edited the anthology More in Time: A Tribute to Ted Kooser (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), which won a 2022 Nebraska Book Award. She was the Founder and Editor of Birdfeast, an online poetry journal that ran from 2011-2021, and has also served as Editor-in-Chief of Salt Hill Journal. She currently works as Associate Editor for Prairie Schooner.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Poli has lived in Central New York and Nebraska, where she worked seasonally on farms for ten years. She received an MFA from Syracuse University, an MA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.