Feeling It

Skin Memory (The Backwaters Press, 2019) The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Paperback, pp. 96 ISBN: 978-1-935218-50-0 — Skin Memory (The Backwaters Press, 2019)
The Backwaters Prize in Poetry
Paperback, pp. 96
ISBN: 978-1-935218-50-0

Skin Memory is John Sibley Williams’s fourth collection of poetry, not counting six chapbooks. It’s his second collection in one year (2019). You read that right, second in one year. Hang on, there’s more. Skin Memory happens to be Williams’ second prize-winning collection in one year! Oh, yea, and one of those chapbooks, Summon, won a 2019 JuxtaProseChapbook Prize.

In spite of that, it wasn’t how prolific Williams is or that he happens to be a nineteen-time Pushcart nominee or the long list of other awards he’s received that drew me to this book. Admittedly it was much more superficial than that. It was the flesh of the title that slowed me down enough to want to take a longer look. The sound of the title, Skin Memory, was conjuring a myriad of images well before I even opened the book and looked beneath its epidermis.

Pulled me right in to:

Because you are what song breaks open your throat […]

Please pretend this sentence is three rows of exclamation marks in bold 48-point font. May I repeat? “Because you are what song breaks open your throat […]” Be still my heart. Between the title and the first half of the first line of Williams’s opening poem “Skin Memory,” I knew this was a book I wanted to read. And so, it goes:

[…] and because the
same century burns a different mark into me. For now I can just listen.
To how choreographed our forgetting. To the dark little narratives of

How could one not want to read more?

And, then, by the end of the opening poem, I’m not so confident that I’m comprehending; not completely. I’m certainly feeling it. Yet, I know there’s much that I’m not understanding. I’m intrigued and want to know more. I want a tour guide or, at least, a button on the page that I can press that will vocalize John Sibley Williams’s commentary.

Fully following it or not, one thing was certain, those first lines were already, already, following me. I felt it. And I welcomed this new conversation. “Because you are what song opens your throat and because the same century burns a different mark into me.” How beautiful is that? Do you feel it? It’s rich. It’s textured. It slows one down. It’s fresh and there’s something else, something clearly right outside the edge of words and poetic analysis. It’s something in that place where lyric meets melody.

Here, try these lines from “New Farmer’s Almanac.” Say them aloud three or four times:

[…] At least the world
still smells like the world:
dirt-rich, deliberate,
as much oak as animal.

Then repeat, aloud, the following from “Advice Picked Up Along the Way” and, again, hear the sound of poetry that takes us beyond words to a place of feeling poetry.

[…] but the weight feels right
for the deeds we drag behind us. […]

This is poetry that begs engagement. Not Twitter-length engagement or skim-the-headlines engagement or text message engagement. It seeks - or maybe it offers - a slow, line-by-line, word-by-word, deep engagement. Lines seem to ask to be repeated. Poems seem to say, “Now go get a glass of water, look at the cardinals at the feeder, then come back and we’ll talk some more.” And in reading Williams’s poetry aloud, over-and-over, in an attempt to hear what the poem has to say, its musicality has me feeling as much as, if not more than, thinking. And in that place of feeling, understanding expands. Skin Memory is multilayered poetry revealing itself with each reading.

There is poetry within poetry. This poet brings tight lines that could stand, on their own, as full poems:

From “Sons of No One”:

So far all the suicides have been men
in my family. […]

Here’s another, a line from “Tonight’s Synonyms for Sky”:

[…] The thing
about the sky is: whatever names
we give it are as temporary as those
we keep giving and erasing from
ourselves. […]

Skin Memory is not fluffy. For example: “If I could reconcile the fullness/of the moon, of the black oak/tonight’s moon illuminates, /with the bodies I’ve seen/in photographs hanging […]”

The terrain is scarred with cruelty, loss, inheritance, and what it means to be a child, a man, a father.

From “Hekla (Revised)”:

[…] In time, lava hardens into
landscape, and we walk over old fires
as if history cannot burn us. […]

Williams’ imagination and dedication as a wordsmith allows us to linger without becoming weighed down in despair. His verbs surprise with a delight that brings the reader in, closer. They create an intimacy. “Maybe it doesn’t take winter to make a tree/in winter or dewpoint to vague a morning field.” “[…] to vague a morning field.”!

His metaphors are equally difficult to gloss over or forget, “[…] stars thrown around/ the sky, like toys I’ve left scattered across the living room for people /bigger than me to trip over. […]”

In Skin Memory, Williams gives us plenty of opportunity to slow down and meet poems face-to-face. Plenty of opportunity to engage in deep conversation, to develop deep listening, to examine quick assumptions, and to see things anew. Plenty of opportunity to feel. Plenty of opportunity to resonate. Plenty of opportunity to connect.