Kiting April,

     There’s so much goodness to celebrate in “Kiting April,” ---- its Dickinsonian dashes; its alliterative and formal richness; the way it grounds itself elementally, in soil, wind, sky; its intricately-woven, evocative sound system; and oh, the verbs, verbs like skive and skirr, so wonderfully strange, carefully plucked from the word hoard. I also love the natural feel, the rightness, and fluency of the challenging and complex triple conceit: plowing/sowing/kiting.

     I dig poetry that burrows down in order to launch upward. If the tripartite conceit ultimately sends “Kiting April,” skyward into its final, “upward full timbre[d]” trajectory, leaving us eventually to “skirr the empyrean,” it first implores us to get “mud-kneed,” to bore downward, way down into the rich veins of our prosodic and linguistic heritage. Formally, linguistically and conceptually,  the poem bears a debt perhaps to Seamus Heaney, not only his early excavations of language and his experiments with form (e.g., the artesian stanza), but also his middle and later work, poetry that invites us “to walk on air.”

      I admire how this poem seems to invite a (re)consideration of its formal, figurative and lexical operations in relation to English poetic tradition and inherited notions of lineation. Working as it does with the familiar trope that conceives of lineation in terms of plowing with a team of animals, Lane’s plowing/sowing trope might recall famous twentieth-century celebrations of agricultural arts and the pleasure of rural life, works like Heaney’s Mossbawn poems or Edward Thomas’ At The Team’s Head Brass.” But Lane seems to invite consideration of even earlier approaches to the act of tilling and turning within the open field of her poem. Her speaker suggestively “push[es] a breast plow,” a primitive, labor intensive agricultural implement used by poor farmers working small, hardscrabble plots of land. Lane’s approach to making and breaking lines appears to place her conception and execution of lineation in a trajectory running through Piers Plowman all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon line employed by the Beowulf scop. Listen to and look at the Old English feel of this sequence: “third week. Crocuses already blooming / centuries ahead. I till and turn / the bed, soak my seasonal brain / like seed. Mud-kneed. I edge and furrow—    

     While lines like these don’t strictly replicate Old English alliterative patterns and medial caesura, they sure do gesture toward everything that so wonderfully holds the two distinctive phrases of the Anglo-Saxon line together. It’s marvelous how much discipline and ingenuity Lane invokes in the yoking of each portion of her cleaved lines: a glorious pararhyme (“ahead-bed”) balances out all the alliterative progressions. At the risk of overstating Anglo-Saxon linkages, I’ll conclude by saying Lane’s lines most impressively resemble the Old English line in the way they invite me to pause with and hear the poem’s silences,the (un)soundings bridging the gap between breathing and not breathing. Beginning with its prominent Dickinsonian dash in line one (“you will find me in white –  billowing”), the poem instructs us to register brief breaks in our utterance of its sonic progressions, to see and hear silences created within white space or through the momentary appearance of sound gaps introduced via medial end stops, commas, and other devices. Isn’t it wonderful how this poem manages so many surprising and pleasurable ways to mark time.