by Allisa Cherry
October 18, 2022
Allisa Cherry's poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Maine Review, Nine Mile Magazine, The Ilanot Review, Rust + Moth, The Columbia Review, and The Account and has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. She lives in the Pacific Northwest where she completed her MFA at Pacific University, teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the United States, and reads poetry for West Trade Review.
A Brilliant Loss by Eloise Klein Healy; Red Hen Press; 64 pgs.; $14.95
In 2013, just three months after she had been appointed as the first poet laureate of Los Angeles, Eloise Klein Healy contracted a virus that led to Wernicke’s Aphasia, a disorder that impairs the brain’s ability to attach meaning to language. This would be an extremely difficult experience for any person, but for a poet whose occupation is translating and making sense of the world around them through words, it presents a particularly exquisite conundrum: how can one find their way back to poetry through poetry when language itself has gone missing? Healy’s new collection A Brilliant Loss is a smart, slim volume that generously explores this experience.
In the first stanza of the opening poem, “Releasing the Tears Again,” Healy sets her readers up with the most critical piece of information we will need in order to grapple with the major themes of the book before us. She writes “Here’s the worst thing I’ve learned. / My brain ripped alongside my aphasia / and thereafter nothing ‘remembered’ my language.” This creates context for the poems that will follow, poems that explore how aphasia impacts the speaker’s daily existence as she works to recover meaning even as words slip from her grasp. In “Aphasia’s Not What I Can’t Say,” Healy writes, “I know where I am / but can’t call it a table. / I also don’t know how to say lamp / or couch, chair, armoire, bathroom.” In “Blueberry,” she states the predicament more generally when she begins, “All the changes of words, / I wait again today.” But this collection isn’t just about loss. It’s also about how that loss affords Healy the gift of rediscovering her life, her love and her language, as she emphasizes in “Maybe If a Name Mattered,” “My life has re-mattered my own aphasia, / taught me my heart’s pure attempts / to lean into myself, to re-live, to re-learn.”
Indeed, focusing only on the aphasia in these poems would be a shallow read, as there are deeper currents at work here. Healy is interrogating the very nature of self. What are we without language? What is love if the language of love is gone? And what is a poet without poetry? “Nothing spoke to me about me, / about my sweetheart, Colleen. // I was certainly missing, but alive anyway. / How can I describe that right there?” Healy writes in “My Brain Sizzled, April 2013.” One might imagine the exploration of such themes would have the sort of bleak gravity that tends to accompany philosophical discourse, but there are moments of pure levity and optimism in this collection, as in “Turning Like a Figure Skater” in which the speaker states, “Someday I will be able / to rename myself just fine. // Just laureate, poetry and art.”
Very early on in A Brilliant Loss, the speaker names her sweetheart, Colleen. This name continues to be repeated like an invocation throughout the volume and one gets the sense that Colleen has tethered the speaker to the project of regaining her identity. The continued presence of her love serves as a foil to the speaker’s struggle and lends itself to a satisfying narrative arc from the initial poem of loss and determination to the final poem, “Sustain Me” in which Healy concludes, “I open again the palm of my hand / and you offer to keep me. / Never the end. Ever again.”
The complexity of language and self is explored through writing that is direct and accessible. Healy’s use of adjectives, adverbs, and similes is spare and the poems, brief and uncluttered. This is not necessarily a departure from her prior work, which favors clear-headed narratives deployed with concise imagery. In A Brilliant Loss, Healy again takes no risks in having her work misunderstood, but this time the stakes feel even higher. For it is through her careful and precise syntax and accessible diction that the moments of slippage in language and thought are emphasized. The poem “Flurry of Speaking” contains a great example of how subtly she crafts these moments. Healy begins her thought clearly, “Words I knew were wildly different, / my language more than ever imagined.” In the next couplet the syntax is ever so slightly askew: “Nothing now, never normally speaking / was the failing attempt by me to be me.” She pulls this feat off time and again throughout this collection. Again, in the poem “Aphasia,” she writes “How I lost it/ so quickly my language/ Itself lost me and I couldn’t/ assist myself.” When the poet allows the syntax to erode, it creates a wobble in the reader that allows them to experience those uncanny moments where meaning is fleeting.
A Brilliant Loss is a refreshingly optimistic, penetrable, and sincere collection. Deceptively simple in its execution and complex in its strivings, it is a gift of a volume for anybody who ponders how language allows us to invent and imagine the world around us and, perhaps most importantly, the world within us. Through generously accessible language and a deftness with syntax and space, Healy does a masterful job crafting poetry that brings the reader into a vulnerable and personal territory so they might ascend with her from the chaos of her aphasia to the gift of rediscovering language, and thus love, poetry and a life.
©2022 West Trade Review
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Remember or Invent: The Self Reclaimed in Eloise Klein Healy’s A Brilliant Loss
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