Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Our Side Of The Clouds

      February 26, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Side Effects May Include Monstrosity

      February 25, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

      February 25, 2021

      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Our Side Of The Clouds

      February 26, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Side Effects May Include Monstrosity

      February 25, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: To Limn / Lying In by J’Lyn Chapman

      February 25, 2021

      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Review

Review: Fearn by Linda Dove

written by Guest Contributor April 22, 2019

Fearn by Linda Dove
Cooper Dillon Books, 2019
37 pages / CDB

 

A quick search on the title of Fearn tells me we are going into a land of letters, and trees. The references also point to the need for heart protection. A scan of the contents (the unvarying repetition of “Fear Is…” followed by unexpected metaphors) warns that we’re going deep. These signs at the beginning of Dove’s collection prove true; what we may not appreciate at the start, however, is how fascinating, unsettling, and utterly absorbing this exploration will be.

The collection is a container, for (“It/is safer to look at fear in a box”), and each poem promises in its title to keep us well supplied along each possible path with a goal and a series of “short object(ive)s” so we don’t get too lost, or burned. We are advised from the beginning “to pull fox-/gloves over [our] hands like suits of petals,” to mind the holes and keep our feet out of the empty buckets that “beg for meaning.” There are lots of maps, and machines, for guidance.

Keeping cover is important, as is staying in motion, relying on bespoke verbs as needed (frankensteins, lilacking), to make staircases as we go. There are explicit threats (“this poem could turn… at any moment”), as well as frequent implications of imminent loss. Knowing Dove’s other work well, I was not surprised to find gripping allusions to Elizabeth Bishop and especially to “The Fish,” as we descend into “tricks of the eyes” through multiplicities of looking selves, many I’s pointing at fear. The speaker of each poem is discrete yet also connected through time and space to every other speaker in the collection. We are encouraged to see poets as bees “inventing their lives from scratch/making a home with their mouths,” sometimes as wolves, “standing on the edge of everything,” or turning ponied words into camels at a fair, into sacred signifiers of difference that can see above ordinary everythings. Dove’s Dickinsonian dashes remind us to keep meanings in suspension. But always, utilizing her “own accusative tense,” she keeps us pointed at direct objects.

Guided well, we do learn as readers to start filling in the gaps. In “Fear Is a Bird-Verb like to Parrot,” we supply the missing letters, so that owl becomes howl, and egret regret. We gain confidence that we will be piloted, despite agoraphobia among the adjacent panes of glass as the poems progressively emerge, “offering… a grid,/tiny muntins/that mean your eye/will not fall/unbound/into that largeness,” for “at any time, it may unzip…open/to the place/inside the place/where we live.” Fear floats on many reflective surfaces throughout Fearn, never fully grounded, and never easy to locate. Perhaps this disorientation is deliberate: one of the implicit fears seems to be being re(a)d, but there are so many mouths, beaks, and tongues in the poems, and speaking out is framed as imperative: “words that you must say out loud – or die –“. We are reminded that our ordinary and usual ways of reading do not always apply and are urged to find new eyes (“green…does not stand for envy in this poem”). Fear merely “appears new” but is always replicating itself, and a desolate pre-occupation with reproduction and derivation always seems just below the surface.

It is only when we have navigated the first half of the collection and shown we can gauge what lies between the “fake bears” do we earn the knowing of Fearn’s speaker(s) more personally, and move from the aching aesthetic pleasures of lines like “skinny and liable to snap/in two like matches that line up/for their chance to burn” to the more intimate and devastating compromises built up by the enforcements of time. The same age as Dove, I find her takes on love and aging hit hard, not because she is cynical but because her skilled hands expose deep roots of stubborn hope growing right beside habitual mistrust: “Trust may be a green chain/ready to give, a late spring, a season we thought we knew.” The relationship poems are disturbing in their deceptive lightness and grim honesty: “You are not a love letter, either,/or a dance…” and “You were probably the one.” Never has “probably” sounded so poignant and so resigned all at once. “This world is not made to be an orchard,” she deadpans, “to pay as you pick.” Even when the poems seem more personal, it remains a literally elemental journey of wood, water, earth, and metal; like fearn, its references stay ancient. The one stark reference to cyber life (“We’re all Facebook friends”) crashes us deliberately down to earth in a late poem about the fragility of light in interstellar space, at a moment when the speaker “lose[s] sight of the sky, the mountains and their far side,/covered in conifers and rain.”

As we approach the end, with losses accrued, we hear how the speaker feels she has KonMaried her life too assiduously; she “didn’t trust accumulation,” and in “Fear Is the Creep of Body away from You,” likens the “calcifications” of time to a cancer, and even while keeping too many carefully packed boxes for no one to look through, she also indulges her desire to “cut it all out.” Such culling

…felt like contrition but also

like tossing beads at Mardi Gras, over

and over, as fast as you can, away, away

to all those grabbing hands. I couldn’t

get rid of it quick enough, and now

it haunts me.

It does not shock us, then, that the last poem is full of empty corners and cut lines, and the fear of large spaces is faced; like it or not, we “Swirl” through questions. At the beginning of Fearn, fear is the key, a definite comparison. By the last poem, we understand fear to have metastasized, to have become indefinite and everywhere, and we have taken several of many possible paths to arrive at an envoi that is only one of several possible haunting conclusions.

We know that with enough time, we will experience all kinds of weather. Fearn takes us into the inherently uncertain climate of our own selves, at a time when storms have already past, and the sun shines, or not, meaning something only when it comes, not from God in the sky but appositely, in a dog’s mouth. We end up on the hook for knowing (if not for the first time then certainly in an intensely intimate new way) our fears, and how and whether, or not, we live with them.

 


Tara Hart, Ph.D., was awarded a Pushcart Prize for Poetry in 2011 for “Patronized” (Little Patuxent Review). She has a chapbook entitled “The Colors of Absence” and several poems in to linger on hot coals: collected poetic works from grieving women writers. Other poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Welter, and The Muse. She is a Professor of English, Department Chair of Humanities, and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Howard Community College in Maryland, and is Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of HoCoPoLitSo (the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society). She has served as a host of HoCoPoLitSo’s TV show The Writing Life in “A Literary Gathering of Women: The Craft of Writing” and “A Literary Gathering of Women: Exploring Themes in Literature.” Her chapter, “Still Points: Mary Austin’s Compositions and Explanations” is published in Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin, University of Nevada Press.

Review: Fearn by Linda Dove was last modified: April 18th, 2019 by Guest Contributor
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Guest Contributor

Entropy posts are often submitted to us by our fantastic readers & guest contributors. We'd love to receive a contribution from you too. Submission Guidelines.

previous post
4 Poems from Abigail George
next post
Variations: Not Your Mundane Music

You may also like

At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell

October 18, 2017

The Forgotten North: Porter Fox’s “Northland”

September 13, 2018

Review: Beshrew by Danielle Pafunda

June 4, 2020

A Stasis More Like Motion: Reading Edward Mullany’s The Three Sunrises

June 29, 2015
Facebook Twitter Instagram
"target="_blank"

Recent Comments

  • furiousvexation Loved this. Killer first line and such a painted picture. Bravo!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 17, 2021

  • Deidra Brown Wonderful, moving work!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 15, 2021

  • Ceres Growing up in a rural area, I've observed first-hand the disparate outlooks between urban children with environmentalist parents and children raised in the country. Modern agricultural practices...

    HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC ·  February 13, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Food and Covid-19
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top