Circa

Hannah Zeavin
Hanging Loose Press

Hannah Zeavin’s first collection of poems hints at locating some important time in our humanity; however, staying true to her broad title, such intimation never commits. Although Zeavin crafts poems with controlled elusiveness and at times, gestures toward early twentieth-century idealism, her choice to title the book Circa permits wild and meandering circuits. This lack of focus creates a larger issue: what happens when readers fail to recognize where the speaker truly stands?

Considering Zeavin’s perspective as the youngest poet to publish with Hanging Loose Press, now a freshman at Yale, her rhetoric explores both vulnerable privacy and mature inspection. This combination is most evident in “When the Sun Came Up and You Were Bent.” She starts by addressing a higher power:

Grandmaster, where is your horse?
Where is the sun to stain each
winded blown brow?

At the end, her address is one of scorn and the “bent” tone is another mix of the broad with the specific:

Grandmaster, have you a word to say?
Your amplification fixed, your drink poured.

Where can I find it?
Between which gilded shelves can I listen?
Where will I find your cleaved idol?

Such grandiloquence continues in one of Zeavin’s more chilling poems, “In the Hollars.” The speaker shows us a sign of exploration, a strange path in some Western Civilization; however, as to be expected by now, the reader must begin to commit as soon as possible in order to know the place, let alone the time. Zeavin’s speaker seems to explore without regard for clarity but rather tone: “200 settlements like this” and we know the moment is growing bitter. Once unable to take notice of “The Great White Hope” sealing the windows, the speaker brings our attention, with her “blanched” eye, to a horrible vision:

across leagues of rivers
and plains and came
around onto a bend:

Three hundred people

Two attached to wooden
signs, feet signaling
direction by their
painted toes.

This indicting gesture is nothing new but what Zeavin achieves is a gross ambiguity through common phrases, which apply specificity and combines these ideas with brave, yet boxed strokes of negativity. Near the end, where we now firmly know the trajectory we take with Zeavin, a chilled imperialistic perspective emerges.

None have yet discovered
the violin of wood and bone
have not chalked the hair
from horses’ tail as it gathers
in the rush and bramble

Just hundreds of uses for skin and feather

They truly are akin to thieves of fire.

As the speaker finally knows her lineage, we can’t help but to wonder; is she pointing at our lineage as well? Who are we if we don’t know our place? The lack of sufficient time and place is similar to the other poems in this collection, which provide a brave abeyance to nearly finished, ambiguous and negative attitudes.

Zeavin also makes a rather prosaic and expansive gesticulation of civilization in “Elephant Slaughter in an Arboretum.” In this poem, the royal “we” works, watches, then cries at the demise of an elephant. Whatever metaphor Zeavin is suggesting, the ultimate purpose of the poem is not what but rather how:

& like they did Antigone, they forbade us to bury the monstrosity for it
was to be, they said,
good fertilizer for the flowers we enjoyed so dearly.

Once again, a near formal claim against a culture blooms but the speaker never clarifies this as fact nor can the speaker and the reader feel a firm ground. Although the topic is violent and the lesson is compared to one learned in Greek drama, we never know where we are exactly. The palpable crime works because of Antigone but isn’t it necessary to know where the poet is truly standing, pointing? Will we require or worse, desire a second reading if the speaker remains so ephemeral?

D-Day, Texas, Mexico, Japan, 1920, Cambridge are the few dates and places within Circa but there are far more poems, like “In Public,” which purposely demonstrate vagueness in topic; however, this poem uses symbolism as method to form capacious signals of time and place. And like some Kafkaesque short fiction, such as “In the Penal Colony,” Zeavin addresses a reader in need of twentieth century answers. Instead of a harrow-execution, Zeavin quickly rushes from “The staff and plaster on the altar” to “the 16,000 light bulbs / where there are towers” in the twentieth century. Is this the birth of our humanity? She never pivots upon the general term public as a time or place but speaks to us through a second person. This is a tradition we all know, passing down information but Zeavin’s allegory is unclear. Kafka too was ambiguous but he asked us to invest in his character’s dialogue. Zeavin’s speaker isn’t as believable; her advice is specific but at the same time, disjointed:

Pillowcases line every off avenue, do not use
them as markers. They are in the business
of airing out nights of complaints
and to them, you are nothing but a circulating
breeze, sent to circumvent the weather.

Are we “a circulating breeze”? Ultimately there is another missed opportunity to transcend beyond one of the most intimate and recognizable moments in this book. Zeavin presents a hard, family drama in “Carnage,” where the speaker witnesses her father’s unexpected arrest.

“Carnage” is one of three poems that mimic a variation of the triolet. Two other poems also make use of cadence. Listing and prose abound in the series poem “The Secret Annex,” which is a lengthy elegy for trapped things and a very disquieting moment occurs when the poem includes the time and place of W.W. II., because the poet suggests holocaust victims are trapped. As a book, the poems in Circa do speak to one another. Despite the issue of ground and elusiveness there are times the language is so specific that the reader must submit to Zeavin’s imagery:

It was 1920 again,
You could tell by the way he sat in his car,
All white behind this beach color on his face,
Confused by it and warmed by its leather and pleased. (“Sodom by the Sea”)

Sometimes we must make a leap with our speaker and hope he or she takes us somewhere we want to go or somewhere we need. The unfortunate parts about those leaps are the required trust and of course our ability to move with confidence in time and place.

- Dan Flynn