Body of Crimson Leaves by Celia Homesley

The Backwaters Press, 2006

“a star/which grows slowly/more luminous”: Reading Celia Homesley’s Body of Crimson Leaves

To look at the cover of Celia Homesley’s debut poetry collection, Body of Crimson Leaves, one can easily imagine a Gretel or Red Riding or Snow White, some innocent and utterly curious girl, unafraid of the unknown, adventurous, and willing to get lost, in order to discover the bodies of leaves, the brilliant flesh of earth, and the haunting ease of trees. Homesley’s poems are quiet and unearth a hand willing to remove layers of bodies, slowly, for the hands to discover dirt, to discover a desire to listen to the river that “lies still,/nerves rotted” (44). This is a book of longings that penetrate the senses until the self is frightened, until the self is unabashedly clear about what it means to “die/picking flowers for/the dead” (45).

Body is a journey, of sorts, a collection that, as the title of this piece suggests (from “Night Pond”), reveals its interiors slowly, as if the body of the book itself, and the body of the poems themselves, are stars that do not, at the end of their lifespan, dim, but pulse and radiate, provide light by which the work can be read. In “Lily in Rain”, Homesley writes of a relationship that has wilted and blossomed, through age:

Old love

White trumpet

You curve through the hole
In my fence as if

I will float
Down into this weeping
Press my lips against your throat (16)

Similar to other poems in this collection, “Lily in the Rain” ends inside of a moment, leaning towards a silence, an emptiness, as if the poem itself waits for the luminous moment. Here, the poet leaves us in the stillness of desire, that of the “I” and that of the “lily”: each seems to want what the other possibly cannot and will not give. The sparsity of language, of punctuation, & of the line are further signals of the quiet embedded in curiosity and longing, and the promise of illumination if one is willing to listen and hunger. (Note, for example, that one unusual line, with “as if”, lingering off to the side, alone, and wondering.) These are not easy poems, ones with a firm ending, a closing of the door or the resolution of a problem; these endings signal wistfulness and perpetual aching.

Homesely works at her best when she sets out to discover what she’s willing to anticipate, whether it’s the lily she could press her mouth into, as lover, or the she who waits to dream of taking “lovers./Like shadows” (62). In these poems, the writing is direct and curious, and the poet embodies the minor quakes of need. In the back matter, Ralph Angel notes that “Everything grows in … Homesley’s [poems]. Everything rises and returns.” And if the line is a measure of growth, if the line is a measure of rise and return, then Angel’s elucidations are apt. When Homesley writes of the body in “Journey of the Spiritual Body”, for example, the “child/who feels worthless/save what his fingers/form//steeples/or the visages/of birds” (39) creates, in the line and its break, a body and spirit that “rises and returns”. We have to wait, in Homesley’s poems, for the light to break, to give way to feeling and meaning.

Body of Crimson Leaves builds and shines in this emboldened debut collection. While there are several poems that fall flat (in terms of tone and query), it is the body of imagination, the “chaos/I like to think of as beauty/when no one’s here to tell me otherwise” (31) that sparks and guides.

Related posts: