Review
Prisoner of the Swifts by Judith Skillman
Ahadada Books, 2009
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom
Judith Skillman's eleventh book, Prisoner of the Swifts, reveals a deft poet secure in her craft, rendering the complex emotions involved in grappling with topics like aging, illness, and the bittersweetness of grandmotherhood into poems rich in imagery and allusion but never lacking in teeth.
These lines from "Indian Summer," my favorite in the collection, are a dazzling example:
The sun blanched white and then it kept day and night equal as halves. Termites bubbled from a stump. A cedar grew yellow, orange, then red. Its swollen wood took the stick you propped in an entrance. One simply swallowed and the insects emerged all over again, wearing wings like Beautiful Beings. From a hole in Rimbaud's rotten leg termites flew in numbers.
At other times, Skillman's touch is lighter, but the mood she creates is no less palpable, as in the third stanza from "The Knife."
In the afternoon the tin man will walk you down to the river, stepping over stones smooth and slippery as fish, accompanied by the creaking of his left leg. You'll follow without an oil can, wanting to be tender, needing just the right answer for clusters of swollen flowers.
Not all the poems in the collection's four sections, numbered with epigraphs from the French poet René Char, possess the urgency of those two, but the tone never falters, and there is a thread running through them of candor in the face of complacency, deep honor for experience, and an acceptance of art's limits in encompassing what is felt, as in the closing lines of "Rue."
This is the place of weeping—where whatever is wept over remains unchanged. Things cling to their violins in the half-baked light, and then, too soon, it is evening. I am still kin to the Germans who strike and beat their family of batons in keeping with that kind of music where the chords are never resolved.
The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book Storm (Blue Begonia Press, 1998), Judith Skillman is the author of 11 books of poetry, and her work has appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, and numerous other journals and anthologies. Her poem "Columbine" appears in the current issue of Melusine. Please see www.judithskillman.com for more information.
