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Karenne Wood. Weaving the Boundary. Sun Tracks. U of Arizona P, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-8165-3257-5. 78 pp.
Karenne Wood's second collection of poems, Weaving the Boundary, builds on some of the dominant themes of her first, Markings on Earth, to powerful effect. Land, history, language, loss and questions of recovery, the meanings of intimacy in contexts that redefine the personal and communal-these are the concerns that compel a collection both beautiful and disturbing in which the beautiful and the disturbing are sometimes breathtakingly merged.
The two books' titles suggest their common grounding-"earth" and "boundary"-but "markings" and "weaving," noun and verb, intimate a subtle difference. The "markings on earth" of the earlier book's title poem are material relics, ruins, traces of ancient mounds, "remains / of ancestors" (Wood 27). Likewise, the title poem locates the book historically and emotionally in a particular known and loved place, Wood's Monacan tribe's Virginia homeland. The poems that begin and end the book, as well as most of its explicit geographical and cultural references to indigenous experience, affirm that location. Describing the book in this way, I do not intend to circumscribe its range or energy, only to suggest one way in which Weaving the Boundary represents a somewhat different kind of project, albeit with important shared concerns.
The new book's epigraph, from a poem by Czesław Miłosz, identifies the book's "boundary" in terms that exceed any notion of physically mark-able signifiers:
For from what could we weave the boundary
Between within and without, light and abyss,
If not from ourselves.
These lines imagine a boundary as dynamic, movable, perhaps meditative; made of "ourselves," it is both intimate and collective, and it is offered as a question. The boundary may be "between" but it may shift, as the terms it presumably separates may shift. Thus the epigraph and title together suggest that this book will be less about memorializing or otherwise responding to "markings" and more engaged in a process of creating changeable possibilities. Again, rather than wishing to imply that Weaving the Boundary departs from the vitality of concrete, material experience, as it surely does not, I mean to suggest something of how its engagements with such experience might differ, subtly, from those of the earlier book.
This book doesn't...