Hello, the Roses

“How would you find meaning, except by chance?” asks Berssenbrugge. Split into three parts, her new book (her first since 2006’s I Love Artists) consists of multisectioned poems that, like theorems and notes toward theorems, seek to uncover meaning “outside… perceptual range.” Turning to landscape, nature, and even fashion as a starting place for image and idea, Berssenbrugge, who has previously collaborated with visual artists Kiki Smith and Richard Tuttle (her spouse), is concerned with the empty space around a subject as much as the subject itself. “I don’t feel connected to what I experience, and I speak with him about it,” the poem “Pure Immanence” begins. “I try to connect through the outline of an animal, starting with our dog, then turn to black wing against the sky.” The voice throughout consistently values careful, fragmentary rumination over sheer emotionality. “Between any experiences, memories, objects are silent rhythms and intervals,” and the silences between each discrete statement in these poems lend a distinct movement to the book, accruing meaning slowly and through the process of chance observation. “Afterglow casts gold horizontality across water, yellow seaweed, rose sky.// Why does it fill me with happiness, with liberty?” These poems offer a fresh encounter with the otherwise familiar, a place where “style, soul, is power through which matter is formed.” (May)