In Barbara Siegel Carlson’s new collection Current, the world is porous, fluid, and translucent. Through repeated motifs of mist, fog, water, clouds, leaves, wind, and feathers, we sense the lingering echoes of natural and human history in the present day.
Speakers’ personal lives meld into the larger world, leaving their mark on natural and geologic timescales. In “Blessing a Stone,” at the beginning of the book, a speaker picks up a rock and feels a visceral connection both to the solid ground at her feet and to the vast, ethereal universe above her. As she says, “I pick one [stone] up and rub the striations, as if I could draw from the lines some message, some memory of its passage. Pausing, I close my eyes and see the stars.”
Statues, monasteries, graveyards, and Italian cities and country towns with long histories feature as prominent motifs. We feel the silent, yet heavy, weight of history in “To the Statues of Rome” and in “From a Bench on a Hill.” Yet, while the presence of the past – Roman and Renaissance marble statues, a destructive earthquake in 1976 – is inescapable, neither piece stays parked in bygone days. The speaker in “Statues” finds her eyes drawn to a parrot flying through the concrete plaza, and in “Bench,” bells continue to ring, dogs to bark, and men to mow their lawns.
Every person, animal, or plant who has ever lived has value and plays a part in the long march of history. Ordinary people matter as much as great historical figures, appearing in several intimate and tender pieces. There’s the mother in “Mother to a Daughter in Pain” who sees herself as “the sepia branch of a pine coming to life like a conductor poised above the red leaf, drawing it to some higher power, and holding it in the stillness of prayer.” And unhoused people in “The Fog is Adrift”: “In the sleep of the homeless, the drifter goes on unheard, deep in our pockets, the forgotten still breathe.”
Even when people throughout the years fall by the wayside of society, they have a place within the broader human and natural world. Everyone belongs, and everyone ends up in a similar space in the end, witnessed by and absorbed into nature. As we see in “Aside the Tracks,” in a random spot outside a train window, there rest “shadows of roofless mansions. all crushed together like centuries of lives/pressed in the rocks/ to be worn away by the wind and water.”
Near the end, in “To a Further Blossoming,” a dead oak tree becomes a jaggedly splayed, coal-colored bouquet against the sky. A haunted, haunting thing.” The narrator reflects that it appears less threatening up close, laments that it “hadn’t finished blooming yet” and says it reminds her of her father’s open wound, which she dressed during his last days.
Our history is inextricable from that of the universe, and our creations and our beings live on through love and memory. As Barbara Siegel Carlson shows in Current, we all meet and flow together at the touch of our many infinite worlds.