On the Poems of Lauren Rhiannon Lockhart

Paul Klee, "Insula Dulcamara," 1938 [public domain]

The poems of Lauren Rhiannon Lockhart took me by surprise. What are we to make of a poem that begins “None of this happened:” except to see where the author takes us, what other tricks she has in store, what detours we must take? In certain of Lockhart’s poems, her searching, strangely disjointed rhythm can at first seem slightly awkward. For example, her poem “Skinned” begins,

What is movable?
then what is beneath what
moves me?

Then a table set with unburned candles
slim and skinned

I mean as if they had none
skin.

As we follow the author’s lateral movements, however, we begin to see their hidden logic, that these trip and falls are a means of fracturing our habits of perception, of catching the psyche off guard, of opening the possibilities of sudden illumination. By the poem’s end, we are invited to view the author as a corpse, to view a universal situation from a peculiar angle. Lockhart casually comments,

when I die my body will frighten someone
hopefully

not a small child

Lockhart’s style slips with unsettling ease between ambiguity and specificity, the outdoors and the indoors, the open and the closed. Juxtaposed to the elusiveness of certain evocations, we find lines of an almost childlike simplicity. In her poem “In Time,” the open-endedness of

the undefined space
chasing some great something

something on the edge
you can recognize

is immediately followed by the diaristic

I went to bed that night
Thinking of my life

I was on this boat

And in “Whale,” this type of clearly worded but perhaps difficult to grasp metaphysical assertion

I was born
already grown
shaded and perceptible

is followed, a bit further on, by the hard, Anglo-Saxon directness of these statements:

I sold what I had
I felt lonely and it passed
I saw a grey whale coming to shore
near the market

These are poems that read almost like ancient Norse “riddle” poems, poems that list a string of attributes and actions and that end with, “What (or who) am I?” By a shift of perspective, we can see how these attributes and actions fit together. How did we not notice these connections before? Lockhart’s poems present us with a conundrum; we must then come up with a name, but the name for the state she invokes may not exist in the physical world.

Lockhart’s poems often seem to hover on the edge of incarnation, as if the present were no more than a meeting place, a tentative one, with terms and availability subject to change without notice. There are echoes within echoes, with the personal rippling freely into the universal, the natural exhaling into the supernatural. We suddenly find ourselves transported, only to find that this larger space is far more intimate than it should be, that we have been there not once but many times before.