A Model Year
by Gina Myers
Coconut Books, 2009

[reviewed by Marc Beaudin]

Something profound, exciting, and almost frightening takes place when reading Myers’ A Model Year. The individual poems begin to act upon each other in that there is a certain building up of meaning, sentiment, and impact the more you read. It’s not that the poems are directly connected. In fact, “disconnected” comes easily to mind while reading – a disconnection with the small rituals that make life bearable, a disconnection with lost soulmates and soul-spaces, a disconnection with the pervading logic of language (which is a coffin lock we usually set from the inside).

On the surface, there is the connection of a narrative of a period lived in Brooklyn, and the need to return to a Midwestern hometown. But what takes place within these pages goes deeper than that. There is some subtle movement between the poems; a growing intensity that each page contributes to. Maybe it’s that each poem in this collection is a puzzle piece, one that doesn’t interlock with any other, but all part of the same image.

Searching for a new vocabulary, a way
to say exactly what you want to hear.
I’d like to give all the quiet things to you.
– from “Midwinter”

The fragments of this image never make the mistake of showing too much. They leave us with questions and empty spaces that won’t be filled by the mind only. They accomplish what, I believe, all great poetry must accomplish: to reveal the simple truth that sorrow and beauty never travel alone.

Days like this are sometimes forgotten, x’d out and shelved with
all the rest. There is an absence of birds, although at times their
wings beat against my ribs.
– from “January”

These are poems that should be read and re-read, the way you would listen to a piece of music many times, with each repetition revealing more; hurting and soothing more. The long title poem closing the book, with echoing, reverberating couplets, seems to be a microcosm of the entire book. And the book itself, a microcosm of all of our lives. The personal cum universal.

Always wanting what we can’t have, we create tension
one word at a time. Pulling the narrative away until we’re lost

& it’s lost, left behind in the restaurant or on the subway.
– from “A Model Year”

I find myself not wanting to talk “about” these poems. Not wanting to be guilty of their diminishment. The best way to tell you about this book would be to sit you down and read it to you.

Marc Beaudin is the poetry editor of CounterPunch and the author of The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds and Other Poems. More information can be found at CrowVoice.com.