My Shining Archipelago

Winner of the 1996 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition  Talvikki Ansel’s My Shining Archipelago gives us a front-row seat in a true Amazon theater where, says poet and contest judge James Dickey in his foreword, “Ansel finds her way of bringing into language the hellish magnificence, the perverse pluralism—more, always more, in the Amazon basin.” This cycle of “freewheeling sonnets” (Part II of the book) is cradled between sections of ambitious lyrics that recall Dutch still lifes in their intense scrutiny of pears, eels, gutted birds, to get at their essence. The book closes with a second sonnet cycle that inverts the subject of the first: instead of European civilization (the opera house Teatro Amazonas) coming to the jungle, an untutored human who is just learning to name things—Shakespeare’s Caliban—is dropped in the middle of Elizabethan London.  Flemish Beauty  Yesterday, all winter,I had not thought of pears, considered:pear. The tear-shaped, papery core,precise seeds. This one channeledthrough with worm tunnels.Bruises, a rotten half—sometimes there’s nothing leftto drop into the pot.That phraseI could have said: “you stillhave us . . . ”The knifeslides easily beneath the skins,top to base, spiralingthem away.The insubstantial us.It could as well be the peartalking to the river, turning tothe grass (“you still have us”).Besides, it’s just me a pear in my hand (the slop bucket fullof peels)—and sometimes, yes, thatseems enough: a pear—  this larger one,yellow-green, turning to red:“Duchess” maybe, “Devoe,”or what I want to call it: “FlemishBeauty.”When I can’t sleep,I’ll hold my hand as if I helda pear, my fingers mimickingthe curve. The same curveas the newel postI’ve used for years, swingingmyself up to the landing, alwaysthrowing my weight back. And alwaysnails loosening, mid-bound.