How to Live on Bread and Music
Jennifer K. Sweeney
Perugia Press
ISBN Number: 9780979458224

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          In 2006 I reviewed Jennifer K. Sweeney’s excellent first poetry collection Salt Memory. Three years later, it is my distinct pleasure to review her second, which I believe shows remarkable growth in her range and use of language.

          In Salt Memory, Sweeney’s verse was frequently short, sharp, lyrical, and, for lack of a better word, pithy. In How to Live on Bread and Music, Sweeney displays the same interest in lyricism and the well-formed line, but her poetry just seems to be…larger, not only in image, but in terms of scope and ambition. In the book’s five sections, she tackles such topics as nature, childhood, and grief—all staples of her previous collection—with not only her trademark gracefulness, but also with an eye to expansion. If Salt Memory showed that Sweeney can handle short form poetry, How to Live on Bread and Music shows that she is equally capable of handling long form which, as most poets will attest, is often as difficult to sustain as shorter pieces are to pare down.

          To review what makes Sweeney an excellent short form poet and to give an idea of her growth since 2006’s Salt Memory, I draw the reader’s attention to a number of this latest collection’s exquisite shorter pieces, of which “How to Make a Game of Waiting” (here reproduced in full) most closely resembles the brief, lyrical work that made the previous collection so successful. This poem is what I often refer to as a “how to” piece—that is, a form of poetry that attempts to solve an existential or at least broad problem (in this case, how to wait for something) with a set of fantastical instructions. This subgenre seems to have become popular in both speculative and mainstream poetry in the last five years or so and is, perhaps tellingly, one of the many “how to” pieces scattered like pebbles throughout Sweeney’s new collection.

This is a capsized game
and there is no display of aces at the end.
Buy a rare and expensive plant that never blooms.
Rearrange your books by the color of the spines.
Bury all your keys that don’t unlock anything.
These are not rules but merely suggestions
of what has worked for others.
For instance, the man who painted landscapes
on his daughter’s sheet music.
Put a big rock on your desk.
Do not name the rock.
Take the numbers off the clock and mail them
to your creditors.
Stitch the hours onto a kite.
Every night, ask until you can hear what replies.

          In this short, breathless piece, Sweeney gives the reader a series of unusual, whimsical, and ultimately startling images—the burial of spare keys, the man painting over sheet music, the stitching of hours into cloth—to reveal that imagination, whimsy, and attentiveness are the surest and best companions with which to dance through the hours. Sweeney’s interest in such imagery can be seen throughout the collection in such pieces as “The Skaters” (a rare, more narrative piece about the misadventures of two sisters), the surreal “Comfort” (on finding solace in an often vague and perilous world), “Death Valley” (a favorite of this desert-dwelling reviewer for its stark desert imagery), and “Requiem for America,” which I think may be one of the most subtle poems about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their damage to America’s psyche yet written. I reproduce it in full to show how Sweeney’s careful control of line, image, and metaphor can be precisely devastating.

It was not about sadness
though the magnolia
turned while we slept

and we could not find
the iron map of stars.
Sadness would have been a consolation

for that saw-toothed hollow,
would have indicated joy,
but the heart carried

no such sailboat
and we rowed across static.
This was about the first

breath held back,
small death
of instinct,

and when the last
violin was pure
friction

we had only
a few moments
to choose.
 
          Sweeney builds upon her gifts of image and line in the book’s longer poems, which press to the edges of the pages, onto multiple pages, and onto the shores of narrative without losing any of their lyrical sharpness. In “Birds of America,” for example, the speaker describes a self-directed reading period in a classroom full of boys in a poem that feels at once familiar to Sweeney’s style yet very much like a departure. Here, she tells the story not only of a teacher’s fondness for his or her students, but also his/her realization that change, growth, decay, and death will come for them. Note that Sweeney here expands her line and endows it with a more prose-like, conversational feel without sacrificing any of the poem’s subtlety or surprise.

Jordan is most fascinating,
darting to the meager library’s reference shelf to retrieve
Birds of America, a blue upholstered birder’s bible.
He is the only one who has ever read it
and does so as a sailor reads the sky and all its falling,
methodically, page one to end,
as if the order bears a secret numerology.

Kingfisher               Cinnamon Teal              Rufus-Sided Touhee

After struggling all day to stay focused,
Birds of America is Jordan’s anchor,
harvesting his own version of happiness.

When he tells me that 69% of all Great Blue Herons die
in their first year and that some day he might be as tall
as their six-foot wingspan, I remember how one flu-ridden spring
a grayish trench coat swaggered past my city window
like an apparition or codeine side effect
and landed on the neighboring roof peak.

The Great Blue Heron folded into its scythe-like form,
a messenger miles from any marshland
and bearing something I wasn’t able to see.

          Indeed, two of How to Live on Bread and Music’s five sections are devoted exclusively to multi-page epics: “The Listeners,” a fugue based on the speaker’s memories of listening to the radio with her father, and the experimental “The Arcata and Mad River Railroad,” which I think is the stronger of the two pieces. Here, Sweeney again blazes new territory as she breaks her line into smaller and smaller pieces while describing the speaker’s meditative journey along rusting railroad tracks “by the slow burn/of summer.” In her unusual arrangement, the words become not only items in a museum but the very tracks the speaker walks upon and, eventually, the sound of a ghostly, chugging locomotive that once traveled the tracks. The overall effect is one of astonishing clarity and melancholy.

v.

At the ramshackle depot
an odd museum of things
driven down by iron stakes:

Pacific Rail timetable                       Arcata departs at 8:00 A.M.

                        expired license                        a William T
           
                                                pocket journal

dining car menu
           
                                                            coffee 10 cents

                         laminated map of Northern California

how our things speak for us                and what you’ve left behind
   
                                                 (tree house, sister, tradition, ambition)

is continually arriving as it is found and found and found

          Readers who enjoyed Salt Memory and who are interested in tracking Sweeney’s career will find much to like in How to Live on Bread and Music. However, her book should also be picked up by readers of contemporary American poetry—poetry by women, in particular. As I did in my review of Sweeney’s first volume, I reiterate my belief that she is one of the best young poets writing today, one other young poets should study as an example of the heights to which well-crafted image and form can take their own writing.