The poems of this poet’s first full length collection address corporeal affliction and the changes that befall the mind and soul of that body’s inhabitant. Sarah Stockton is Founder/Editor-in-Chief of River Mouth Review and author of two chapbooks and an upcoming third. She also writes nonfiction, much on spiritual practice and direction. For more than two decades she has lived with myalgic encephalomyelitis, a condition she describes in metaphor and effect, even naming metaphor, and by inferential extension, penning poems, the creation of a lulling rhythm, the shaping of language into story—here, almost into lullaby—as a coping strategy for pain:
“From Metaphors Attempted in Conversation with My Doctor” (p.9):
the center of the trunk of a tree
then my body
is a carved and weathered cedar boat
rocking in the wind’s wake
rocking
I rock myself to sleep
Stockton divides the book of fifty-four poems into three roughly equal sections, “Skeptics and Healers,” “Castoffs and Connections,” and “Solitude and Grace,” with a haiku to introduce each.
The poet sent me The Scarecrow of My Former Self in exchange for my poetry collection, (as set up by Lana Hechtman Ayers, manager of MoonPath Press, Concrete Wolf, and World Enough Writers). As a kind of thank you note, I wanted to post my gratitude on Facebook, so I thought I’d dip into the poems to be able to say something not generic. I began with the final poem, the titular poem. Then I read nine more, turning pages toward the front of the book. Forcing myself to stop, I set the book aside and wrote my “it’s here” message knowing that otherwise I wouldn’t get that task done for hours or days. The story of the poet trying to understand her body and its behaviors (beyond her control and choice) was riveting.
The Scarecrow of My Former Self is attractive to look at and touch, with a cover of a bare tree, crows on the highest branches, as a gray silhouette on white, the title in large black letters over the image and the MoonPath Press color band along the bottom in ochre, an ochre with more green for the back cover and spine. MoonPath Press books are all handsome and feel nice. They are perfect bound. The blurbs from Jeannine Hall Gailey and Jill Khoury emphasize how this poetry delivers grace, hope, and reclamation as it declares realities of living with a chronic illness. When I picked up the book next, I wondered if all the poems dwelt in the realm of illness?
Yes, AND—
In “Studying the Vagus: Footnotes,” (p.11), a prose poem in numbered list form, I admired the zing and humor of “5. Correction by Editor: any comparison of a body/with a sea floor is a misrepresentation/of the biological facts./ One cannot stowaway in one’s own body.”
Good poems employ metaphor. Metaphor, by definition, yokes things. So, here is the sea floor spreading its depth and breadth across the pages of a collection focused on myalgic encephalomyelitis. Of course, Stockton hinges her work on a variety of metaphors that weave their variety into the imagery.
Not only by metaphor do other concerns appear in this book. There are a few poems that stand a short distance from the central theme such as “So Far Away” (p. 44), which yearns for her daughter. Through them all I learned a lot about this illness about which I knew next to nothing. Stockton has helped me better understand pain. For example, “Brain Fog Fragment” heartbreakingly lies double-spaced and nearly punctuation-free on page 18. The gaps and the line breaks between words and phrases promote a sense of things in pieces, a coming apart, as with the thought process in a brain fog. The reader gets a hint of the experience of the fog. I see definitive diction and formal structures as some of Stockton’s parries with the barrage of challenges hurled at her by a debilitating and mysterious medical condition. She faces a futility with candor, intelligence, and humor.
Many of her poems are familiar forms: haiku, sonnet, pantoum, abecedarian, epistolary, list, dialog, (or less familiar) antiphon. There are couplet-ed poems, left-justified blocks of text, tercets, double-spaced lines, semi-concrete shapes. There is a smidge of rhyme. Then there’s the shape of the whole book, from one version of the scarecrow to another, the hopeful initial scarecrow creation of “Survival Plan” (p.7) to the dancing entity of “The Scarecrow of My Former Self” (p. 69), weathering wild storms.
While the poet mourns in “Chronic,” p.20, “I surrender what I never grasped. Nothing sexy about/chronic pain, nothing funny—//not a good story.” Meanwhile, I was thinking, this story is riveting. This collection is riveting. In “Beyond (p. 55), Stockton asks, “Has anything that anyone/has ever written helped us to feel closer/ to whatever it is we are longing to behold?”
Yes, and thank you, kind poet.
The Scarecrow of My Former Self, MoonPath Press, Newport, OR, 2024. 76 pages. 2024 Washington State Book Awards finalist, Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award finalist.
