Living Fully, Dying Well: A Review of Alison Prine’s Loss and Its Antonym by Nicole Yurcaba
In mesmerizing verses rooted in nature, Alison Prine casts a precise and memorable spell that attempts to rectify a lifetime of grief. When words fail, the speaker in Prine’s poems turns to nature for consolation and clarification. Pastures become quiet places where a speaker reckons with their mother’s death. The speaker, with “mouth stained with sugared ice” finds the inspiration to be brave a pacing blue peacock. As time continues with an unstoppable, ravaging force, the speaker finds solace in a lover’s hands holding a book. These elegant poem in Loss and Its Antonym deliver the swiftest of emotions and place the smallest of moments beneath a philosophical, personal microscope.
Prine’s poems display nature’s splendid majesty, and poems like “Display” remind readers that they can find personal lessons about living in the creatures surrounding them. In “Display,” the speaker watches a blue peacock which, after 11 PM—“when the lights would finally dim” would fan out “his iridescent tail.” The lesson the peacock imparts on the speaker is that “Sometimes a bird / can learn to love the darkness.” These lines transcend the page and echo Eliot’s “Wait Without Hope” and the memorable lines “So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” Observing the peacock leads the speaker to an epiphany—that they have practiced how to die well since they were a girl, and that when the speaker greets death they will do so in an “uncoiling slow motion” and their “heavy colors high.” Thus, the poem develops an encouraging, enlightening death positive outlook—a nudge to readers to bravely, and beautifully, accept the inevitable.
“No One Hurt Me Without Loving Me First” is a soft confessional, discreetly romantic, and astutely sincere. The lack of punctuation throughout the entire poem adds to its confessional tone, and the speaker’s incorporation of natural elements solidifies the poem’s romanticism. Water is a noticeable, powerful force in the poem. “Gentle waves” move a “pair of wings / submerged at the edge of the clear lake.” However, the lake is also a larger metaphor for the “strength of certain memories / that move beneath the surface.” The lake’s deceptive expanse is a metaphor for grief’s undeniable, and often unescapable, depths, and the poem’s structure—longer lines interspersed among shorter ones—mimics the lake’s waves and movements. Therefore, “No One Hurt Me Without Loving Me First” is a poem in which Prine’s gift for matching form to subject matter truly epitomizes.
“Harbor,” too, defies traditional form by relying on right-alignment. Given the poem’s gorgeous depiction of a lesbian romance, the defiant alignment is only appropriate. Again, Prine masterfully utilizes brief lines and a lack of punctuation to enhance the poem’s more sensual elements, and this combination is especially noticeable in the first stanza:
the first time I loved
we lied and said
we did not exist
though I knew
her hair falling
around my shoulders
and the serrations
of her breath.
The sea once again becomes an integral, important element to the poem:
the outer face
of the sea shines
with the likeness of clouds
being offered
back to themselves
on a windless morning.
It becomes a space of self-recognition for the speaker, and the speaker’s immersion in this recognition is evident in the linguistic resonance of phrases like “outer face” and words like “offered.” “Likeness” and “windless” echo one another and carefully balance the stanza. As the poem concludes, a sense of rootlessness permeates the final lines:
I have only
known tomorrow
for what will not be there
though I wake
in a harbor town
as if it belongs to me.
Again, Prine’s gift for using one word—like “known”—to balance another—“town”—emanates. “Tomorrow” and “though,” with their near rhymes, also create a sonic tugging that mirrors the speaker’s sense of not belonging but wanting to.
The collection’s final section on time’s fleetingness and how it sweeps each and every individual into its hands unforgivingly possesses a metaphysical magic entirely its own. “Pick Any Hour” is a gorgeous tribute to the individuals who enter one’s life and reshape it in a single moment. It opens with three stunning lines:
from the calendar of days
we’ve spent and ask
how it was between us.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker relies on repetition to mimic time’s cycles—“days and days and days / slip off behind us.” Bookending the poem are three succinct lines:
your voice reading aloud
the words gone, the book
but not your hands.
Simplicity is the key to the stanza’s emotional grip. The simplicity also adds the sense of a memory’s diminishing, as though the speaker can recall only the faintest details. This sense of diminishing adds a haunting, ghost-like quality to the poem that reiterates time’s unforgiving onslaught as it relentlessly moves forward.
Loss and Its Antonym wrestles with devastating loss and trauma, and in these verses nature becomes the ultimately healing force. Time is a brutal friend who constantly reminds the speaker of their grief and loss while simultaneously forcing the speaker to reconcile with their path in order to determine their future. More so, Alison Prine’s gift for breaking language and coercing it to bend and fit the situations that often leave an individual speechless and in doubt surprises, awes, and leads readers into a celebration of the small moments which save them.
Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. A poet and essayist, her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.