Bending into the Light

In Bending into the Light, the visual artist and poet Alice Attie has an eye out for birds. They fold themselves into such exquisite lines—strokes, dashes, and parallels—that Attie can’t resist turning them into verbs:

one by one
we swallow

we warbler
we finch

mourning dove
tanager

When they become nearly invisible at dusk, she persists as an observer of their forms, which linger “ephemeral for the eye, suspended / for the mind, swarming for the ear.” But Attie’s birds are not aimless, she uses them, as does the unnamed character in “Mass in B Minor” (referred to as “she”): “To anchor her thoughts, she takes hold of the shapes that populate her mind.”

Attie’s process is primarily visual. She distinguishes the eye’s work from the mind’s conclusions, pausing before translating sight into image:

Solids are posturing. Indemonstrable and innominate.
To the eye, they are unbidden. For the mind, they are posited,
Poised in perfection. As things among things, they are.

The best poems in the book stem from Attie’s flair for observation, while poems lacking in some sort of optical logic are less sharp, as if viewed through a blurry lens. For instance, the poem “Ten Selves” that imitates the form of myths retold in oral traditions falls short of its objective: “The forth one wasn’t able she was unsure in all things     she wavered       in all things / her mind travelled back.”

For Attie, a shape is not a mere container for a more solid thing, but a way of being—on paper and in the world. This notion is perfectly framed by the word trace, which appears in the epigraph by Georges Perec and sets the tone for this book, as, at once, noun and verb. In both forms, trace resists disappearance. Toward the end of the book, a few photographs taken by the poet’s late father are marked with white ink by Attie, a gesture that brings them back into relevance, like inscriptions against oblivion: “Our bodies will end / All the pages will be written.”