Apparition Wren by Maureen Aslop

Main Street Rag, 2007

We’re often trained to think of titles as the entryway to the poem; after all, it’s the first thing the eyes (are supposed to) land on when first encountering a poem. Some of us (renegades that we are) choose to save the poem for last or to meet it somewhere in the middle of our reading, a sly glance upwards that says “hmmmmm. . . now what is this poem doing?” Sometimes the title is a place-holder, sometime it’s a key to the workings of the poet’s mind. In Maureen Alsop’s debut book, Apparition Wren, the title of the collection works as the latter.

Alsop’s poems are wicked, irreverent, often tender with a sly edge; yes, sometimes they’re abundant in their play, and she goes after this decadent language with intense vigor. They very often perform as the title of the collection performs, as a little mystery with logic built in: what is an apparition wren? Is it similar to an apparition of wrens? Is it the apparition of a wren? Is it the voice of someone startled who accidentally left “of” out of the equation? Is it a child speaker? A dialect? I’m still not sure, but I certainly enjoy the topsy-turvy smashed up world the title (and the poems themselves) toss me into.

In “Autobiography of Fresh Oil” Alsop takes on the voice and attitude of oil that has seemingly lain itself on a road and is interrupted by a farmer, who drives his tractor over the oil. Of course, this angers the oil, after all, it’d lain itself out to be sunned!

Where the oiled road tapered into a bend
past shaded oak, I flat
lay myself on it. I burn
under the gravel sun. Until

a tractor come: he, farmer
of cornfield, say Fuck; yes (1-6)

The poem takes many a surreal turn and the voice of oil becomes muddled, less slick, abbreviated, and damaged: “I want/to enter him into me in repulsive way”, “But//blank my speak”, “A breeze//punish me”, “Later, I squeal//to the good doctor” (17-18, 21-22, 25-26, 31-32). Eventually, the oil “come[s] to know/nothing/of [it] self” (43-45). This is Alsop’s Apparition Wren at its core: ever-turning, ever-searching, ever-leaping.

In the oft-quoted poem “Daguerreotype Portrait of Woman and Bird” (itself a mine-field of style and tone, attitude and experiment (beginning with a six-line stanza on one page, moving to a 3-stanza 11-line poem on the next page, a 4-stanza 16-line poem on the next page, and followed by two pages of stanzas that alternate from solid structures to shifty foundations)), Alsop throws in 8 lines (3 stanzas) of backward slash marks to indicate “thinned ink” that had been “cramped” on paper:

// //////// //// //
//// // /// ////// /////

///////// /// //// / ///// ///// /////// ////////
//// /// //////// / /// ///// //////

/// /////////,
//////////////////////////
/////////////////////////
//////////////////////// (42-49).

I had the great pleasure of meeting Maureen Alsop recently. We took a walk together and laughed at the funny names of plants and agreed that poetry, often, is the intense desire to laugh with and play with language, to interrogate it, to twist it and sharpen our tongues on it. Apparition Wren, with its multiple voices, its attention to detail, and its hybridity of contemporary languages and archaic diction certainly masters the art of poetry that makes one want to work hard to get to the heart of every word.

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