Firewatch

Jan Verberkmoes writes of literal fire in this spirited debut―“The field is pocked    with flame and char / and the lake    a flooded socket deep in its middle”—but fire serves deeper thematic and formal functions here as well. This is a detective story of sorts, whose pastoral setting is dark and saturated with menace, and Verberkmoes powerfully evokes a sense of dread: “The heat switches    with insects. The grass weaves    and unweaves itself. / You taught me    some birds are sirens and sound off // just before the fires burst.” 

Thematically, fire anchors a large suite of violent events, most of which are merely alluded to: dead forests bespeak beetle kill, a “wind / only whistles from the purse of rifle mouths,” and, most evocative of all, a lost loved one―perhaps a sister―is continuously addressed. Details are hazy, but a series of elegies threads the collection, and the speaker provides just enough hints for the reader to surmise a horrible fate. 

In “Event Point,” we read: “I should explain― there’s a man   loose    in the woods / and she guards her body    like a house.” Here we witness Verberkmoes’s flirtation with narrative as she pits lyric fragmentation against linear storytelling. In this regard, fire is a formal strategy, a metaphor for the crackling arrhythmia of Verberkmoes’s caesura-riddled cadences, but also a flickering luminosity that allows parallel realms to interlace, as when a lost companion suddenly appears: “The wet trees flicker on    and off. // Lying on the grass next to me red / your red hair rustling.” Here, as elsewhere in this collection, the poet unsettles notions of time: we could be in the past, or in a rueful memory of it; it could be before or after the fire.