Star Lake
A deadpan, self-assessing voice pervades the poems in Arda Collins’s second collection, Star Lake. “My life seems short and uninteresting, / but I like it,” the speaker says in “Shaded Road.” “I fail at seeing and at everything,” she says in “Way.” These statements may cause readers to bristle—“why should I be interested?” we might ask—which is certainly the point. Such doubt reflects what the speaker in one poem calls “my black mind,” but Collins draws back from a self-involved darkness in poems where her Armenian ancestors, her late parents, and her beloved appear. In “Late Summer, Late Winter, and Genocide,” the playful but ominous rhyme of sorrow/tomorrow gives way to a fearful apparition:
[…] Keep your heart light
or keep it full of sorrow; it’s been decades since I started this
poem
and now it’s tomorrow.
Low thunder in a purple sky scares the horses. Chert fossils
from an old ocean scatter in the desert covered over with dirt.
The river is distended
with the bodies of dead Armenians.
One of Collins’s poetic methods is a paring away of pretense to reach the mystery at the core of experience, though sometimes she cuts too deeply, as in the over-simplistic statements that open “Scale”: “A cloud is big. The shadow of a cloud on a mountain is big. A small cloud is still large.” If the effect is comical, this faux-naïf divestiture of complexity can create an almost burlesque sense of dislocation, serving as a strategy, along with delicately assembled lists and self-referentiality (“This Is the Poem” is one poem’s title), to embody and gain purchase on the unsayable. When the speaker’s alienation gives way to the strange wonder of other people, Star Lake finds its métier in the tonic otherness of love, as in the entrancing “112”:
Through this, I love you and true,
there are ways
that must be;
a kiss on the forelock
for the horse at the doorstep;
at the end of the story
all that is said
is quickly redressed and put into bed.