My Shining Archipelago (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition   Talvikki Ansel’s My Shining Archipelago gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says poet and contest judge James Dickey in his foreword, “Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism—more, always more, in the Amazon basin.” This cycle of “freewheeling sonnets” (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things—Shakespeare’s Caliban—is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.   Flemish Beauty   Yesterday, all winter, I had not thought of pears, considered: pear. The tear-shaped, papery core, precise seeds. This one channeled through with worm tunnels. Bruises, a rotten half— sometimes there’s nothing left to drop into the pot.                                   That phrase I could have said: “you still have us . . . ”                   The knife slides easily beneath the skins, top to base, spiraling them away. The insubstantial us. It could as well be the pear talking to the river, turning to the grass (“you still have us”). Besides, it’s just me a pear in my hand (the slop bucket full of peels)—and sometimes, yes, that seems enough: a pear—                                         this larger one, yellow-green, turning to red: “Duchess” maybe, “Devoe,” or what I want to call it: “Flemish Beauty.”                  When I can’t sleep, I’ll hold my hand as if I held a pear, my fingers mimicking the curve. The same curve as the newel post I’ve used for years, swinging myself up to the landing, always throwing my weight back. And always nails loosening, mid-bound.