One Turn Around the Sun
Tim Seibles
Etruscan Press, 2017
Tim Seibles’s newest collection, One Turn Around the Sun, examines the chimaeras and constellations of selfhood that make up a life. Seibles ranges from six months after his own conception to his fifty-ninth year, depicting with great nuance the complicated lives of his parents, and meditating on how those lives dovetailed into his own. The interlocking poems of One Turn Around the Sun read more like an autobiographical novella punctuated by villanelles, or a suite of jagged solos played on the bad axe of the self, than as a traditional collection of poetry. Reading this book is like listening to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: one comes away with the impression of a fully articulated vision of awe at what it means to live, to age, to long, to acknowledge death, and to attain an infinitesimal speck of paradise through music. Seibles aims to cull the quark from the neutrino, to apprehend the bits “of your life straggling / behind you—empty cans / hitched to the newlyweds’ car.” In the title poem, Seibles voices the collection’s central concern: “I believe it is hard to be human, to be these / new animals, hard to say yes to this singular / blood and to the flying world that made us.” For Seibles, it is the flux of personality and the fleetingness of our time on this planet that binds us to one another and allows us to remain partially intelligible despite the difficult bonds that sing us to distance.
Seibles constantly navigates and remaps the distances between parent and child, citizen and state, lover and beloved, self and world, poet and reader. Although the details of a life skitter away and memories scuttle, although the stifling sleet of American history rains through these lines, Seibles inveighs with Blakean fluency against the displacements caused “by jobs, by septic religion, ghost-dick capitalism, television—.” Against all that stultifies, Seibles enjoins:
Suppose, just once, you saw a middle-aged maniac
skating telephone wires like a squirrel, or one
glad woman jumping balconies and boulevards
as if time were a trampoline—think how gladly
you would lose your mind: look
what the Takers have taken and the monsters
they have made, the tame zombie-playmates
they have made of us: smiling, bobbing
for the job, trotting along, when we might be trolls
under their bridges—billy goats butting their
smug asses—when we might re-write the world!
What is that restlessness? What is this rage?
Proof that the rose still burns in your blood—
root and branch, thorn and bloom, proof
that your brain is a bucking horse, that
your soul remembers and bites the leash; I want
such teeth in my mouth. Why can’t we
have a world worthy of the wheeling sun?
The Earth is a house that flies!
Fuck all the powers that be.
One Turn Around the Sun is proof the brain is a bucking horse, that we might re-write the world, that time is a trampoline, that the earth is a house that flies, that our orbits are circumscribed by the gravitational pull of our loves, and that we must spend what little time we have on this globe learning to bear the beams of these mysteries.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.
Love it!
Posted by: nynke | December 19, 2017 at 08:28 AM