The Academy of Hay
by Julia
Shipley
Bona
Fide Books, 2015
ISBN:
9781936511150
75
pages
__________
Julia Shipley is an independent journalist and author of The Academy of Hay, winner of the 2014 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize and Adam's Mark, named a Best Book of 2014 by the The Boston Globe. Winner of the 2006 Ralph Nading Hill Award and two-time recipient of Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Community Fund grants, she was also awarded The Frost Place's Grace Paley Poetry Fellowship, as well as fellowships to The Center for Book Arts and The Studios at Key West. Her poems and essays have appeared in CutBank, Colorado Review, December, FIELD, Fourth Genre, Gettysburg Review, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Orion Magazine, Poetry, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Taproot, The Toast, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from The Bennington College Writing Seminars and lives in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.
A native of southeastern Pennsylvania, she earned her undergraduate degree in Environmental Education traveling throughout the western regions of United States with the Audubon Expedition Institute. Throughout her twenties she worked on organic farms in the Northeast operating as CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), and for the last decade she's tended the soil on her homestead in Vermont. Hence her work is often obsessively concerned with place, the fate of landscapes, agrarian ideals, and stories that track things from germination through their harvest and beyond. The former Director of Writing Studies at Sterling College, she's a contributing editor to Yankee Magazine and contributing writer for Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Weekly. She has also written for BELT, American Forests, Burlington Free Press, Northern Woodlands, Stowe Guide, The Magazine, and Vermont Life among others. A portfolio of her journalism is here. Interviews with Julia and episodes exploring her thoughts on craft are included in: Whole Terrain and this joy + ride and North American Review.
__________
I've
never met Julia Shipley. On what she
described as "one of those browsing benders," she happened on The Kentucky Review, where she read one
of my poems, and in my bio found my writer's website through which she found
more of my poetry, and eventually contacted me. In her email she talked about
the whole point of writing being "to connect," and that since my poem
spoke to her, hers might speak to me.
And indeed, her poems I found online did speak to me, so I agreed to her
sending me a copy of her upcoming poetry collection, The Academy of Hay, for a possible review.
—Karen
L. George
__________
Review of Julia
Shipley's The Academy of Hay
The poems in Julia Shipley's The Academy of Hay speak of cycles, transitions, connection, and duality with
repeated imagery of light and dark, tenderness and violence, growth and destruction/disintegration,
life and death experienced in daily life on a farm amid crops and farm animals.
Her poems are infused with a passion for paying
attention and an emotional core of wonder, reverence, and longing.
The first poem, "Narcissus
Cleaning the Bulk Tank," in the first section titled "The Herd,"
introduces the reader to the idea of duality through the image of seeing
herself mirrored in a steel surface she is polishing by hand:
She
assembles
under
my industrious hand:
worried
out of occlusion,
beneath
my agitated rag,
she
grins back from the polished steel.
These lines also create a sense of wonder
and playfulness that echoes in other poems, and the image of creation—of bringing forth this other self—through the work of her hands, another repeated image. The poem ends with a push and pull motion that
appears again and again in this book, along with the central idea of connection
and disconnection:
When
I reach for her,
she
welcomes me;
if
I recoil
she'll
flee.
An additional layer of meaning I saw in this poem was the
idea of the poet creating—assembling
poems and polishing them into being—the
push and pull of the writing process.
Another poem that contains imagery
of mirroring, duality, and shadows is "Heron, Gnomon," but its mood
is anything but playful. The last section reads:
Once
I suddenly noticed
I
had no shadow except
directly
beneath me. I
straddled
a black so opaque,
it
was the hole and the earth
was
an urn
into
which I will fit
entirely.
The shift from the past tense to the
future tense of "I will fit" effectively creates a tension in the
poem, along with the haunting image of the earth as "urn" suggesting
a death and a funeral urn.
Which leads perfectly into the next
poem, a prose poem titled "Ballistics" where the speaker discovers a
bullet on her driveway, which leads to musing (seemingly playful, but dead
serious) about the motion
of projectiles,
hunting (accidental and intentional deaths), innocence and guilt, and a first
sexual experience.
The underlying theme of
"danger" in "Ballistic" echoes the poem, "Horn," which
tells of a ram's horn that grew towards its eye:
The
morning the horn grazed eyeshine, at the brink of his blindness,
the
farmer showed up, hacksaw in hand.
She
keeps this stub to remind her.
This poem's ending image of keeping the stub is a haunting
one, suggesting not only the vulnerability of this ram, but the precariousness
of all life, and the responsibilities involved in caring for "The
Herd," as this first section of poems is titled. The phrase "brink of
blindness" also implies how quickly things can change—another major idea expressed in the poems.
The following poem, "The Day We
Woke Up With and the Day It is Now," speaks of transitions and flow, how one
sheep during the night nudged a gate open and all the others followed into the
garden, where they "graze on tender lettuce, bean shoots, coils of
peas." This phrase is just one example of the beautiful images and sounds
Shipley creates with her word choice. The
poem begins in darkness and transitions into day at the end: "while the
mountains settle out of the plum sky / I'll follow all day." This ending is
not only pleasing in the visual image it describes of the mountains slowly
coming into view, separating from the plum color of the sky, but in the
soothing, dreamy sounds of the repeated l's. This poem is full of delightful repeated
sounds and internal rhymes such as "turn to lure," "nightgown
and muck boots," and "rubber bucket" that bring the poem alive
in the reader's senses.
In "Jewelweed" and
"Bird Count" Shipley considers reproduction. In "Bird Count,"
she tells how "The hen uses her beak to nudge-pull / the egg under her
breast," and in "Jewelweed" it's the release of seeds:
All
week I've watched purses of milkweed
leak
a soft exhaust—
fine
hairs climb successive breezes,
still
you resist.
I've
wanted you to open like a ribbon with a slipknot.
Again the above lines create visual
beauty as well as beauty of song with the repeated sounds of "week I
watched," "milkweed leak," "soft exhaust" and
"fine hairs climb," creating a lush, languid mood. And by addressing
a "you" in the poem, she creates a sense of intimacy that pulls the
reader deeper into the poem's experience—something she repeats in other poems.
The poem "Being" is a
reverie with lush imagery and repeated sounds about bees and how they are a
perfect example of "being":
...no
allegiances,
except
to self and burrow (as body to shadow),
shuttling
from mallow to mallow,
to
flummox those pink-sided stadiums, a
revelry,
tussling
with stamen, stoking gold on their abdomens
The collection's second section
called "Barn Storms" continues with examples of the kinds of duality,
transitions, and cycles that occur with life on the farm. In "The Garden of Whirligigs" we
see death and resurrection imagery:
I
took my spackling knife and scraped
the
wings of living moths out of wet paint.
In
spring I'll find the road pockmarked
with
little caves, their stones all rolled aside.
In the prose poem "Heartacre"
the speaker describes the struggles of farm life as "our stubborn stab in
this endeavor, our vulnerability to the elements, well, I'll speak for me, for
whatever comes or falls or fails, I'm steeled." This spirit of tenacity is
echoed in the poem "Draft" which describes a team of horses pulling weights,
but also suggests the teamwork a relationship between people involves:
A
Bad Hitch is when the team pulls unequally
as
we have, and the mismatched lurch
keeps
the boat at a halt, despite their heart.
This idea of the necessity of things
working together is echoed in the poem "Persuasion":
The
saw persuades the tree to forfeit an upright
position
and relax its length against the earth.
The
hammer persuades the washer to lie flat in the hole
the
drill has persuaded the wood to open.
The couplet form emphasizes this
push and pull tension we've seen in earlier poems, and also brings to mind the
give and take of human relationships. In
another poem employing couplets, "Elegy for Anger," the reader
doesn't know the reason for the anger, but the working through is described as:
she's
crouched on an upside-down milk crate, with a knife, clippers,
whittling
the dirty wrappers off garlic,
snipping
the stems and root fringe,
pitching
each finished head in the basket
There's a sense of tenderness and
yet violence in these lines, and I couldn't help but get the image of some
other acts of violence the speaker might be imagining as she does the necessary
work, creating a tension that vibrates through the poem. This tension continues
in the poem "The Letdown," where "He keeps a herd / of words
inside— / they mill around / like cows in a free-stall / barn at night, / their
full udders ache." What a stunning
image of the weight of that milk aching like the weight of unsaid words.
The third section, called "The
Academy of Hay," opens with a poem called "Migration of Baling
Twine" that describes the many ways the speaker has seen twine used, inferring
the idea that on the farm, as in life, things are always in danger of coming
apart. The poem ends with a powerful image of the precariousness of farm life,
which I feel also echoes life in general:
I
have seen it eel its way, from one lump sum
to
plenty of crude-ish sutures, like twenty extra fingers
pinching—as
if the farm were a wound or a bird they keep trussed,
keep
from blowing crawling falling growing away.
The theme of duality emerges again in
the prose poem "Winter as a Profit and Loss Statement," where the
speaker muses over what changes the winter will exact, with haunting, violent
images such as "The chicken's struggle written in wing marks and scarlet /
beside the dog prints stabbed in the snow" and "The cow's / bloated
body is hard as a brick at the back of the barn." Alongside these stark
images are tender ones: "Her finger
traces the valley of his back" and "Snowflakes stick singly and doubly to a cow's roan coat." At
the poem's center are the intriguing lines that speak of relationships: "She's felt a man go away without moving
a muscle. She's seen a man veer away from a woman and he didn't move at
all."
In the fourth section,
"Husbandries," many of the poems speak to the sacredness of the land
and the farm animals, and the speaker's connection to them. In
"Her/Herd" she describes the cow as having "a womb-shaped
face." In "Discovering Venus, April 1820" she says:
"surely, if the earth does anything, / it divulges everything: apricots,
lima beans, / marble goddess." She conveys such reverence when she details
how the Milos farmer unveils the statue:
He
spits in his fingers to release
her
features, eases the crumbs from her eyes,
the
cool orb of her shoulder fits the socket
of
his palm...
The poem "Kokoro" beings
with the couplets: "I know a woman who grows herbs in the cracks of her
patio / so guests will crush them under loafers and swing-back flats—" and
continues with this intriguing idea of connection or interaction between two
things resulting in "this scent from contusion." She goes on to say:
Like
an orange thumbed open, torn from its rind, citrus sticking
to
everything there's an art to how we abrade beneath each other's
needs,
demands; if flesh absorbs touch and touch abides,
her
ruptured greens scuffed underfoot
make
spice a kind of grace.
The near rhyme of "spice"
and "grace" at the poem's end adds emphasis to the tenderness of the
image, as the repeated sound of "ruptured" and "scuffed
underfoot" in contrast adds to the violence of the visual image, again repeating
the idea of life's duality.
In the sensual poem
"Eating," the speaker compares tasting a honeysuckle to a priest
placing a communion host on her tongue, suggesting her act of connection or
communion with the natural world as just as sacred as her communion with God
through the sacrament of Communion. The sounds are so musical, the images
breathtaking:
She tweezes the sepal
from a honeysuckle
for its intense sweet bead
seated amid flange-like petals.
All of her attendant and
intent, all of her gathered...
each honey bead sates,
and wakes,
her craving.
These last three lines echo the idea
of duality, in that the sweetness of the honeysuckle satisfies and yet at the
same time makes her crave more.
In the book's last section,
"The Herd of the World," the poem "Sufficiency, September 11, 2006" continues with
the idea of life's duality— life and death, violence and tenderness. On the
anniversary of so many deaths, the speaker is "holding their takeover
tool," (a knife) to harvest lettuce, which she describes herself "sweeping
/ its edge through the slender necks of lettuce, / placing each head in the box
you are dragging / along as the minutes go by quietly 8:45, 9:03, 9:59, 10:28..."
She ends the poem with the haunting lines, "the lettuce stalk weeps a milk
sap / on both ends—the part still rooted and the part freed; / dawn cruises
into noon, you have everything you need."
The poem "o" continues in
this same vein, where she's planting white beans and gherkin seeds, wondering
"will anything take?" The poem ends on a grim, contrasting image to
the one of seed-sowing:
...I
feel a twinge
near
my right kidney—
little
grain of me or star,
more
silica than cell,
you
sort of something,
you
begin your
fall
toward loam.
The lines "little grain of me
or star, / more silica than cell, you sort of something" have a whimsical
tone, but the last two lines suggest the speaker's decline and eventual death
in the image created by "your / fall toward loam," reminding us that
we humans are indeed all on our way to dying.
The poem "The Needle"
continues this imagery, beginning with the statement "I teeter / between
extremes—". She gives us the following examples:
one
hand finishes the beetle /
sleeping
by his leaf meal,
the
other plucks you a raspberry;
this
hand cups an asterisk of chick:
later
this hand cradles the axe that lops
its
matured head, an apostrophe
The playfulness of the chick as asterisk and head as apostrophe effectively contrasts the
images of violence that she performs as part of farm work.
The prose poem "Gloves" is
a type of meditation on the work hands do:
"tucking" seed potatoes "in the earth," then months
later twisting "the numerous doorknob tubers loose." She lovingly describes
catching and freeing a bird her cat caught and let loose in the house: "I
recapture it, closing my fingers around the bulb of blue feathers, absorbing
its scampering pulse. Releasing it to the cherry tree in the yard, then my
hands seem hollow." The poem ends with the beautiful image of her hands as
"unsheathed instruments whose sowing and reaping, seemed from a distance,
seemed like the act / of stooping to shake hands with the earth."
In "Nine Miners" the image
of the bird caught and freed is echoed in breathtaking imagery of the trapped
miners released at the poem's end:
when
they fledge
a
gorgeous disgorgement—
one
two—
three...
...six
seven
and
finally, nine
(over time)
come
to light.
Reading Julia Shipley's poems in The Academy of Hay drew me into the
partnership of a person to the land and farm animals she tends, and how these
connections relate to partnerships with people and the life we share as
humans. Her lyrical, evocative poems
strike a perfect balance between light and darkness; they resonate with
tenderness, yearning, gravity and grace.
__________
Karen
George
retired from computer programming to write full-time. She lives in Florence,
Kentucky, and enjoys traveling to historic river towns, mountains, and Europe.
She is author of Into the Heartland (Finishing Line Press,
2011), Inner Passage (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Swim Your Way Back (Dos Madres Press, 2014), The Seed of Me (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and The Fire Circle (Blue Lyra Press, 2016). You can find her work in Naugatuck
River Review, Heron Tree , Louisville
Review, Wind,
Permafrost, and
Still.
She holds an MFA from Spalding University, and is co-founder and fiction editor
of the journal, Waypoints.
Visit her website: http://karenlgeorge.snack.ws/.
