by Nancy Lynée Woo
May 10, 2022
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Elegy for Lost Language in Michael's Wasson's Swallowed Light
POETRY REVIEW
Swallow Light by Michael Wasson; Copper Canyon Press; 96 pages; $15.99
Michael Wasson’s new poetry collection Swallowed Light is an elegy for a lost language. Wasson is nimíipu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Lenore, Idaho, and this collection traces the author’s longing to reclaim the language of his people through sparse, lyrical verse.
Organized into three sections, Swallowed Light returns again and again to images of tongues, teeth, guns, and throats—with the recurring title image of someone “slipping their fingers / down my throat… what light has done to me” as in “Self-Portrait Toward a Fugue [No. – In – B Minor].” Wasson’s lyrical verse seems to turn over and over again, like a marble on the tongue, this idea of lost language, serving up to the reader different iterations of how language is related to culture, family, freedom, and the body. Writing with a personal awareness of the effects of American colonialism, in “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear,” the poet considers the sound of loss, such as “the sound of the field / long after the war.”
Sound plays a significant role throughout the book. In “On the Horizon,” the question of gods arises, with the first line a spin on Genesis, “& I said / let there be dark.” Later in the poem, “every angel not named Michael” [asks] “do you not know / the single click in the mouth / is a tear you are / always to live in?” The idea of guns appears in multiple poems, as alluding to suicide or war, and could be implied by the click; the clicking sound of his Native tongue could also be implied. Either way, how the speaker chooses to live in the face of all this loss is a major theme he grapples with. And the idea of time is not lost. We encounter the idea of centuries over and over again, as in the lines “Because I raze / the field & have, for centuries, / my mouth to revere” in “This Faithful Purge, On Behalf of Your Heavenly Father.” In fact, the collection may be exhaling into the question: What remains after a centuries-long attempt to destroy the Native peoples of North America?
The poem “The Exile” starts with an epigraph from a Chilocco Indian School in 1922, in which a disciplinarian says there will be no “speaking of your Native language.” It was very intentional that Native children were to be stripped of the right to speak their mother tongue as a way of assimilating them into mainstream American culture. It’s worth noting that this book is written mostly in the colonizer’s language, with just one poem written entirely in the speaker’s native tongue. Throughout the collection, Wasson intersperses English with Nimipuutímt, reclaiming fragments of what has been lost. “Extinction is / to the hands / as the lips are / to the first gesture / the tongue carves into the slick mouth / just before prayer,” Wasson writes in “A Poem for the háawtnin’ & héwlekipx [The Holy Ghost of You, The Space & Thin Air].” Within these pages is a distinct self-awareness of what is lost when language disappears—and the author writes toward this disappearing with an emphasis on voice, as if he himself is a disembodied voice without a body floating in “the white noise of translation” (from “Swallowed Prayers as Creation”). The ample use of white space in many of these poems amplify the sense that something is missing.
And yet, writing against the tide of forgetting is an act itself of hope, as we see in the poem “On the Aggrieved.” Wasson writes, “Reach farther until you touch another / hand & you know someone’s there just outside.” Implications of a father’s death, a friend’s suicide, and a mother’s grief churn within these pages. This collection is an elegiac cry of mourning for what has been lost at the hands of American colonialism, as well as an extension toward others who may be adrift in their own search for connection. The book closes on a hopeful note, ending on the lines “breathing to find / your way home” (“You Are There, Almost, Without a Name, Without a Body, Go Now”). It’s as if the poems in Swallowed Light are searching for a home where the acute loss of language can be recognized, so that the difficult act of reclamation can begin for a new generation.
©2022 West Trade Review
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Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, educator, and community organizer. As a 2022 Artists at Work fellow, she brings arts programming to community gardens. Previously, she has received fellowships from PEN America, the Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Nancy is the author of two chapbooks, Bearing the Juice of It All (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and Rampant (Sadie Girl Press, 2014). She has published poems in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tupelo Quarterly, The Shore, Radar Poetry, and Stirring.
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