Intaglio Daughters

Too often grief is a loop. Linear progress is thwarted when the mourner is thrown back to the start, to denial and anger. Fittingly, Laynie Browne has chosen the rondel for the poems forming Intaglio Daughters, written in conversation with The Unfollowing (2016) by Lyn Hejinian, to whom the collection also pays homage (both are books of elegies). Hejinian once said that “the central imperative for mortal beings is to remain immortal (deathless). But mortal beings are always just that—living deathward.”

This continual back and forth, ceasing and persisting, marks Browne’s song-like sonnets. Each is written in response to a line from The Unfollowing, and the last line of each poem echoes Hejinian’s, though in sound more than sense. The title “Ghosts are the shadows of knowledge we crave” is echoed by “Coaxed are the meadows of solace we engrave”; “Night on our faces, for we have many” by “Flight in our embraces (for we have plenty).”

Browne’s world is conjured out of fairy-tale lexis—satin, cinders, gauntlets, fortune tellers, and millet seeds. The paratactic mode hovers near sense but never quite rests on it; as Hejinian once said of non sequiturs: “It is very hard to find things that are completely unrelated to each other […] because the human imagination can connect anything to anything.” Meaning is a radio signal slipping in and out of range, reflecting a world viewed through grief, and the struggle to make sense of loss and death: “We were a solid wreck, darning the word ‘darling.’” A vision swims into view, of a doubled eddying landscape of forms:

I danced with every version of myself unpardoned
by the satin conversation of your lips
I gave myself to an engraved cover, opening doors

Here, the reader might suddenly see the word “grave” in “engrave,” the absence filled with a presence impossible to unsee.