Scott
Bryson was good enough to review Susanne Dyckman’s Source (2014) in BrokenPencil #67. Thanks, Scott!
This review will contain nearly as many words
as the dozen poems in Source
combined. Empty space plays as important a role here as the text does. These
verses are meant to be read with a specific tempo (a slow one) – their words
are spread vertically, horizontally and across pages.
While the poems in this
collection are titled simply – “:family,” “:sister” and “:city” – this is far
from straightforward material. The text of each poem is meant to equate to what’s
listed in the title, as the colons in the titles suggest; however, some
contemplation is required to determine how lines like “borrowing or digging /
where water will not flow easy,” might relate to the concept of “:city.” There are
shorter, untitled missives interspersed between Source’s primary poems, which seem to be a mixture of prayers,
confessions and proverbs, and are considerably more enigmatic: “I confess to
seraphs / the word I strike / is bread / is servant / is forever.”
Thematically, Susanne
Dyckman appears to be analyzing the divide between disconnectedness and
belonging, with the prayerful intermissions reading like a search for relief. In
the final poem, “:home,” the opposing notions make a final collision in a
series of lines that gets to the root of Dyckman’s struggle: “Something near,
cherished, / but how to cherish // that which is also the same as end.” It’s a
bittersweet conclusion to a cycle that hints at a lot by saying little.
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