Arbutus Reviews

With a sure lyric voice Jennifer Kronovet’s first book Awayward moves through the serious topics of poetry (love, death, isolation, etc) without ever taking itself too seriously. Playful language and a sure hand with form allow these poems to romp a bit, to air out and have their fun, but never to end in frivolity.
The first poem of the collection, the title poem, sets the reader up for these movements:
            A hill is made
            less with trees.

            A firm thing:
            not a look.

            We arch. We are
            shaped.

The language is playful and self-conscious of the fact that it is formed and notes as it describes the world that things diminish when we perceive them. The first line claims that the hill is a created object, as it of course is either by nature or by people. The second line changes this perspective and zaps the first line of its literal meaning replacing it with the abstract assessment. The second stanza confirms that we are in the natural and physical world, though and not exclusively in the world of perception. Then the third stanza brings these things together pointing out that perception, the physical world, the stories around us are created, are shaped. All of this delightfully happening at the same time.
The book continues this way presenting images, thoughts, ideas and letting them slip around in paradox, irony, humor. Many of the poems deal with departure and return and the complexity of relationship between people and places that result. Here is “There Are Five Ways To Say You Want Something” in its entirety:

One way to avoid attention:
Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.

And the first line of the next poem, “Excuse Me.”

The train leaves at what time?

In this way the poems talk to each other, inform each other, and provide a nice pacing. I found the book immensely pleasurable and readable. But perhaps more importantly I found the book checking off the box in my reader’s brain as “re-readable.” I like the wit and humor of titles such as “Apples Are No Longer American. Nor Traffic.” And the playful formal device used in the mid-book sequence “The Institute of Classification and the Governmental Dept. Thereof” where each section ends with “Report:” and a comment on the relationship chronicled throughout.
For example,

1.

I brought the eye

Eye as eye, not eye.

The walls were red.
Red is red. Blue is blue.
Color is wall.

A liquid and a solid.

You can see when you are
being stared at.

REPORT: A problem
unfolds.

But these devices never become the mechanism of the poems and take over the voice. At the core of this book is a poetry that lives within language and the consciousness of a persona. It reads like Donald Hall’s definition of poetry, “one human inside talking to another human inside.” The poems never spin off into abstract whims of rhetoric, and can contain startling serious images as the first stanza from “Sediment,”

We met at the bottom of the river.
When you lie, your teeth fill with lead.

Kronovet has her obsessions (light, sight, travel) and the poems rarely root themselves in a specific recognizable place (even when named), but they are never weighted down by repetition or abstraction. Instead, they move forward in quick, consumable, and, ultimately, pleasurable lines.