Forest Reverie: A Review by Suzette Bishop of Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw
The New England forest surrounds us, lives in us, in Whipsaw by Cuban-American poet and essayist, Suzanne Frischkorn. This is her newest poetry collection just out from Anhinga Press. Her previous poetry collections include Fixed Star, named a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, Girl on a Bridge, and Lit Windowpane, as well as five chapbooks. Reading Whipsaw, the forest I played in as a child rushed right back to me: the sounds, scents, light. But the poems also show me how to re-see it as an adult, and more specifically, as a protective mother.
Enter Thoreauvian wilderness to meditate upon, refuge, and Bachelard’s complex, sacred space from The Poetics of Space, its language mined for a long, deft erasure poem, “Before the Gods Existed the Woods Were Sacred.” Expect to not fully understand the immensity of a forest’s workings and its “temporal dimensions,” an ecosystem established “before-me, before-us.” It’s “vast” and beyond our comprehension as Bachelard points out, “[t]o be long in the woods we no longer know where we are.” Despite being a “primeval forest,” it can be denigrated by some. In another poem, Frischkorn calls out a musician’s description of the woods and burial ground near his house, what he thoughtlessly says is “`That happy hunting ground / of the Iroquois.’”
Given its vastness, “vast” being a better description indicating our comparative smallness and the forest’s sacredness, all we can do is engage all our senses, even a sixth sense, to experience it as fully as possible. Frischkorn shows us how, with studied details like “[s]ummer’s leaves screen the road, / every sunrise caught and cradled,” the forsythia canes and buds, tree root systems, hardwood saplings, multiflora rose, barberry, even the coyotes who “swallow the sounds of the forest.” In “Nocturne” we hear a weasel’s scream and in “Half-Light” wake to a stilled winter morning, sparkling snow motes. Details are gathered from a laser-focused attention.
With global warming and a pandemic raging, we walk the forest knowing “it’s all dire” as the forest, the planet itself, and many animal species are in serious peril. And so are we. Frischkorn reminds us of this in “Copse” where Congress sells off federal lands, “to deforest, / to develop, and to cut / enlightenment / from the American landscape,” and a “place / in Antarctica hoards every seed / on this planet, underground, / for the apocalypse.” A tree falls in a storm sounding like a “split / in the universe,” holding up “traffic like a protest,” the surviving trees swaying, letting us know they are still here. “To Breathe It Would Choke You” describes her neighbor burning something terrible, volatile, just as spring is starting, “[t]his week tree buds unfurl, and today fire / blazes.” Her daughter is “singing in her room. / The last bird call of the evening.” Foreboding and ache about “lasts” live behind many of the poems in Whipsaw.
As someone who declares in “The Origin of My Hard Times in Idaho” she’s been a “shield” for her dysfunctional mother and now a “shield” for her daughter, the poet feels this worry profoundly, for her daughter and for nature. In fact, the collection starts with “Dear America,” a poem about teaching her daughter the realities of staying safe. “Tahlequah” in the same opening section alludes to the story of an orca who keeps trying to carry her lost calf to the surface of the water “for weeks,” a heart-wrenching coping with loss. Astoundingly, other female orcas help her to carry the calf. A note at the end of the collection reveals only twenty-five percent of calves are surviving in this pod. We are witnessing the dwindling of a species. How do we respond to that? Doing the collective work of carrying grief is one way, and the poet chants this to Tahlequah. Poignantly, she realizes this is something Tahlequah and the “fox, or deer, or coyote” who pass through her yard and “turn to look at me” may not know. The attempt to communicate carrying some of the burden, however, is significant prayer. “I carry it. I carry it. I carry it” as a single line holds up the rest of the poem and reverberates powerfully throughout the collection.
Later, the deer in “Doe” stumbles in the middle of the road, cars speeding by on either side of her, “the road’s / vibration like the scrape of metal on teeth / for her hooves, woods’ scent within reach” and perhaps her fawns? There’s little we can do; the loop of her stumble, shaky rise in the rearview mirror replays in the poet’s mind. The poem is reminiscent of William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling through the Dark,” but here we enter the deer’s perspective. Both poems suggest the earth, the woods, our children, ourselves; we don’t know if any of us will recover from injuries, avoid humanity’s destructive forces barreling toward us.
At times, the woods and more broadly, nature, instruct us on living despite this fear. The doe in “Trail” jumps a stone fence encouraging her fawn to follow. Motherhood is a delicate balance, not being frozen by fear despite dangers, our current trajectory with global warming, protecting while modeling living fully, leaping. Sexual desire, one rabbit jumping over another during mating, fertility, and seasonal changes are tied to continuation, images of enduring the reader is relieved to find scattered throughout the collection. Part of that enduring includes no second guessing about severing oneself from deadwood relationships and dysfunctional patterns, cutting what we can of those to sawdust for some other use.
Enter a forest of poems when you open Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw, the poems given time and space to be themselves, take the shapes they need to take, something requiring incredible patience along with letting go. Distinct, tonally shifted by changes in light and season, the poems you’ll hear and gaze upon are spare, nothing excessive, appear effortless, comprising a space where we find ourselves, “Like Thoreau alone / in the distant woods I come / to myself.”
Whipsaw by Suzanne Frishkorn
Forthcoming from Anhinga Press, April, 2024.
Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and two chapbooks, including her most recent chapbook, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies, and two of her poems were finalists for The 2023 Northwind Writing Award. She lives in Laredo, Texas, with her partner and two cats.