"Brace for Impact" of Erebus
A Review of Jane Summer's new book
At the structural center of Jane Summer's book Erebus is the sub-title "Brace for Impact," followed by poetically rendered details of the "crash of Flight TE901," the "most devastating/ peacetime disaster" New Zealand had "ever experienced." By the time readers hit this section of the book-length poem, however, they will have already felt transference, the movement experienced at once psychic, intellectual, and emotional to the degree that we have to check for actual physical positioning.
Summer's haunting amalgamation of lyric poetry-cockpit voice recorder transcripts, runway dimensions, transcriptions of music, photographic images, actual and assumed orbiting sequences, names of the dead, and carefully configured white space-takes readers on a journey that increases in velocity as the pages are turned. Erebus is about living in New York City in 1979 and 2013, about self-discovery, about explorers and adventurers who left lovers behind, about flying and crossing oceans, about blue-white snow and "the acrid taste of an inferno."
"Don't/ expect an elegy/ raising the dead" the speaker cries, but Erebus is uncompromisingly elegiac. There is really no way to brace for the impact of this felt loss, and by the end of the poem, we are mourning Kay Barnick and the wreckage of lives.
A literary work about subtext and the space below language as much as textual collage, Erebus commands subtext, such as found in the blank lines of the unfinished diary left on a frozen mountain. The departed tourist's only words portend:
Antarctica 1979 ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________Emptiness and loss are visceral here not academic. On page 84, at the far right side are the words:
Then blackness.
White space rolls out like blinding snow. What follows that phrase is an expanse of emptiness, and we feel the desperate search below words-for those who are gone-in our confrontation with this placeholder. Blank spaces, however, do not appear as limitations but subconscious phenomena. And the texture of the space, as well as the language, takes on three-dimensional shape.
Yet we do not so much discover the enigma at the heart of this literary work as witness the fallout raining down like ash:
No one in the world hears
metal claw ice
or the retort when the craft explodes.
No one in the world sees
bodies catapulted into crevasse
after crevasse
cleaved by the wreck as it hurtled
along ice, the dying animal furiously burrowing (80)
Because of the multi-layered complexity of Erebus and emotional resonance, it is possible to overlook the aesthetic mastery of this work. Yet the trained eye and ear will respond to the symmetry and anaphora before the mind registers cadences and messengers from one part of the poem to the next. Summer tackles the subject of loss and death: "what does death do but make of someone three-dimensional two?" And then she re-examines it as writer's quest in making something three-dimensional into two as print on a page, but also releases its inversion- where poets seek to go-making the printed word into a three-dimensional body we can touch.
To discuss Erebus as something other than poetry would not be accurate, but it is poetry with narrative thread and a ghost or ghosts of a Fisher King-like guide flying us over frozen terrain and the landscape of loss. We know from that outset, in Summer's Introduction, that "a friend of the author had been among the adventurers on flight TE901." Although we receive this knowledge and understand that Erebus traces the annihilating casualties, the airline company's grievous mistake with enormous costs, and the scarcely emergent life of the author's friend, we continue reading as if expecting to find-like the persona-that some cosmic error has been made, and we will pull Kay back from the "netherworld/light."
What do we know of eternally young Kay Barnick as we enter the poem? Her career, her mother's name, her adventurous spirit, her love of life, but Kay is also mystery, not a mysterious person but mystery itself. Defying logic, we realize, paradoxically, that we are searching for her-as is the poet-even though the outcome is already known:
Kay vanishing
...in eternal Antarctic white.
I couldn't have been more wrong. There is no
heavenly circumnavigation
but a DC-10 that flew as programmed,
a missile into the mountain,
...the fine ash that was
a silk scarfPerhaps Summer leaves us enough to love, however, in Kay's words to her dear friend, "Make the worst of what you've done/ luminous." The word luminous is almost too perfect a choice for its denotations and connotations, pulling us in all of these directions-of light, brilliance, clarity, comprehension, flashing, burning, radiance-simultaneously. In its inherent tensions, the motif and refrain becomes both argument and mission: "Make the worst/ of what you've done/ luminous," and we recognize that Jane Summer has taken the worst-the accident, the airline's deception and cover-up, the horrifying collision of TE901with Mount Erebus on Ross Island in Antarctica, and the catastrophic losses, the personal devastation, the desolate world at its most barren pole-and created something that transcends boundaries and limits-of time and distance, of geography and politics, of personal and historical-that is at once brilliant and, yes, astonishingly luminous.