Flowers Around Your Soft Throat
Christina Seymour. Structo Press, $5.00 chapbook (15p)
The ten poems in Christina Seymour’s debut chapbook,
Flowers Around Your Soft Throat, raise everyday suburban life to the level
of the sublime using alliteration, neologisms, and a rich palette of literary
and artistic references.
Seymour, who teaches creative writing at Maryville
College in Tennessee, built this collection on the scaffolding of “A Song of
Loves,” her prize-winning entry from Structo’s 2014 psalm contest. An
imitation of Psalm 45, the poem transmutes the psalmist’s effusive praise for
the Hebrew king into a celebration of domestic life with a partner: “Your
garments smell like our years— / open dresser, quiet nights”. The psalm’s
opulent language mostly appears here in the negative—“My hairbrush is not ivory
or gold”—and in gentle denials of the psalm’s directives to forget ancestors
and focus on offspring. Rather, the poet moots the possibility of
self-regeneration without procreation: “Instead of my parents, we will be the
children / whom we remake and remake for each earth, each time.”
Several other verses are inspired by the visual arts:
Rothko (“It’s not a void if it’s your own heart,” in which cozy vocabulary is
overlaid on negative emotions—“hearths for each sadness, each pearly moment of
need”), a Chinese silk design (“Loquats and Mountain Bird,” where released
birds are a metaphorical counterpoint to the necessity of dealing with a loved
one’s illness), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (in “We, the Painted,” real life contrasts
with the idealism of the image, and the narrator finds herself forced into a
mold by another’s gaze).
Even in poems not explicitly modeled after works of
art, though, the strength of Seymour’s imagery is remarkable. She paints “the
lemon-rind edge of the moon” in “Lack of Grace”; the tumble of autumn leaves in
“Fall, the Redoing”: “yellow and lime green flirt, like an injured bird, until
flaking off to mulch.”Ordinary phrases are lifted into profundity by one
unexpected word, like the choice of a dreamy verb over a functional one in “my
hound swirled between my legs.” Neologisms take the form of compound words:
“being-with-you,” “out-the-window,” “not-needing-to-know,” and
“not-to-say”—concepts that a language like German surely has a single word for.
The sonic unity in Seymour’s free verse comes from within-line
rhyming and alliteration. Hard sounds are balanced out by sibilance in a
snippet like “cicadas send clicks,” while the four-fold assonance in “a parade
of brave raindrops on the pane” augments the internal rhyme to produce an
enchanting rhythm in “Hope Naturally Follows Morning.”
Here Seymour gilds autobiographical fragments with
universal significance. She leads a breathtaking emotional tourwithout straying
far from the foot of the Smoky Mountains. Family and romantic relationships
provide succor yet are always a potential locus of sadness.Nature and art,the
poetproposes, are methods of transmuting this inevitable grief: “We ask any
surprise rain shower to teach us how to weep” as we recognize “the tiptoed silk
of a relative dying.” Readers will be eager to encounter Seymour’s fresh images and
ekphrasis in a full-length collection. (September 2016)
Purchase Flowers
Around Your Soft Throat HERE.
Reviewer bio: Rebecca Foster, an American transplant to England, is a freelance writer
and editor. Her book reviews appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Foreword
Reviews, among other print and online locales. She also blogs at Bookish Beck.
