A holy wink opens “Skies of Blur,” the third and latest collection from mid-Missouri poet Elijah Burrell.
The wink travels from Jesus to the future St. Peter, but also from the poet to his reader across these initial lines: “In Simon Peter’s native tongue, / I wonder if boat and doubt sound slant.”
Here, Burrell raises questions of what a poem — what our language — can be, and how we locate ourselves in relationship. Should we take words, passed from one soul to another, so serious? Not really. Do we ever take our words seriously enough? Again, no echoes in our ears.
Over the course of these poems and pages, Burrell reveals an in-plain-sight mystery: We are always translating. Our experiences, someone’s pigeon-carried letters, the low brass hum of everyday life — each needs to be massaged and manifest in ways we might understand, if not act upon.
In “Skies of Blur,” the poet takes his turn putting his hand to the plow of translation, making our world make at least a few percentage points more sense. Burrell, a longtime professor at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, will continue this act of translation live when he reads from “Skies of Blur” at Skylark Bookshop Tuesday.
How the poet learns to listen — and models listening for us
Burrell reinforces this mission in the book’s second poem “Doing My Best to Listen.” Here, beneath the carbon-copy shelter of a gas station, he tunes his antennae to “a dozen voices calling—coyotes frenzied beneath a moon / they couldn’t see for the clouds.”
These are not simply wild, wordless voices, Burrell comes to understand, but sound and wonder, a fulfillment of the atmosphere around him, just one way of relaying “a message in transit to me my whole life.”
These messages, of what should and shouldn’t be, of simple glories and the stretch into oneness, face unsound barriers. The strangeness of the American dream labors to stop, or at least strain, them. Under his “American Umbrella,” Burrell slips into the guise of a cross-eyed dreamer who sees better than most.
“I spin plates every moment of my life. / I see nothing but yard sale pianos with songs inside them. / I have what they call a can-do attitude,” the poet writes in opening lines that, again, both wink and lament through the white spaces.
By poem’s end, in light of our national reliance on the almighty gun, the narrator’s plates crash, their umbrella ruptures.
Stories we can’t personally approach slow our understanding — until we tell them to each other, as Burrell’s narrator does in “Death and the King of Rock ‘N’ Roll.” Following the voluminous fill, then fade of an Elvis radio song, he shares the King’s life with his daughter, noticing how absences near and far call out in antiphon:
After Elvis has filled our car with a song,
my youngest daughter asks if he’s still
alive. “No, baby,” I say. “He died the year
Grandma had me.” In the rearview mirror
her faint flinch at the mention of mom.
Subtraction. I sense the math fill her mind.
Another domestic scene unspools through “In a World Gone Mad,” exhibiting the noise of our lives, and the need to listen between the lines.
“October in Missouri, / and I wake up to mass murder out west, / my daughter humming ‘Yer So Bad’ / while spoon-plinking the well of her / white bowl of Cheerios,” Burrell writes.
Poems of memories and messages
As we commit ourselves to translate, and to listen, messages break the noise — and conspicuous silences — in sundry, surprising ways.
Memories collide, then convey their kindnesses, through “the little symphonies from childhood synesthesia” (“Do Not Drive Into Smoke”); distant friends broadcast fragments of speech across “opposite ends / of quiet woods” (“Hailing Old Ghosts from My Silo on the Moon”); and, when everything fails, we keep sitting down to silent pianos, straining our ears for hushed voices, making music until the music comes back (“Unable to Sing”).
Words and their meanings come together, links in an imperfect, exquisite chain; they articulate our blessed smallness in a world of social-media dopamine and ancient weather (“Life in the Gush of Boats”); set us in motion to reconcile all our tenses (“Midlife”); bring our definitions of prayer and belonging into sad relief, so we might see ourselves as we are (“I Was Old When I Left Home”).
And, in one of the book’s late, great poems, we learn the power of exhausting the language for glorious synonyms. “Never Say Love In a Poem” captures the poet at work, trying to evade conventional sincerity and stumbling into something better.
“Listen: The small of her back / is drift, her mouth supermax,” Burrell writes.
And, in two of his finest poems, Burrell pays staggering tribute to his fellow translators, offering hope that we will keep at this work, keep breaking through.
Perhaps my favorite poem of the young year, “This is That Song by Alex Chilton (‘Thirteen’)” honors too-good-for-this-world troubadour Elliott Smith, tracing the passage of sound and “Arizona silence” from a 1997 live show to where the rock bard felt safest.
He closes his eyes. He’s back in Portland,
alone in bed, headphones on, and the birch-
white limbs inside him tremble and bend
from the weight of something cold and falling.
Five lines, “Postlude/Grace” ends the collection and begins something else entirely as the poet hands a guitar and his “indistinct” music to his daughter, whose “miraculous fingers / move down the neck like a surgeon closing a wound / that’s lain open too long.”
These words picture what we are always doing for one another. Here, Burrell writes out his translations, then passes them down to us that we might keep going, keep healing wounds borne alone and shared with others.
Burrell will read at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday; learn more about the evening at https://www.skylarkbookshop.com/new-events.
Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He’s on Twitter/X @aarikdanielsen.
