I entered without words

In I entered without words, her fifth collection of poetry, acclaimed poet Jody Gladding draws on her background in literary translation and visual art to create a delicate and dynamic work, one that reaches toward a painterly simultaneity. One can, as the title suggests, enter the poems without words, only to find fields of them scattered across the pages, in spacious formations, at times rippling or craggy, ready to be combined and recombined. Each poem has a set of words in bold, “through-lines” (also used as titles) that “offer a way in,” and a center from which to meander. Some of the poems are paired with a French version on a facing page, often constellated differently from the English rendition, or bearing a different through-line.

The book’s title phrase opens the first poem, alongside the evocative through-line, “my mother tongue licked me into being.” These two utterances, miniature creation myths, are surrounded by disparate words and phrases, including “deep summer,” “for purple aster,” and “articulate,” which create a terrain, a mood, a swarm of language that, as Barbara Guest (a poet this work evokes) might say, becomes, in cocreation with the reader, “winged” with inspiration, and “lifts” off the page.

Gladding mentions another poet, Jean Valentine, as one of many sources for this collection, and readers familiar with Valentine’s work will find a kindred sense of crystalline image and nuanced, even uncanny connections between the natural world and an inner landscape. These poems seem to spring from an attentive consciousness focused on language, mountains, summer and heat, winter and cold, birds, and, fleetingly, on a subtle presence in the book, an illness. The poem “who cooks for you awwwlll,” asks:

                             is that

a barred owl

                call

                             midday

near the phrases: “a scrap of meat” and “pellet of fur / and bone.” The owl apparition and attendant images of carnage are affectingly juxtaposed with the harsh experience of:

                taxol

                   dripping

                   into

 

                a vein

and (following one possible pathway on the page) the civilized response to a small modicum of human comfort, “saying // thank you to the chemo nurse / who brings // a warm // blanket.”