Sapphires on the Graves by Scott Ferry Reviewed by George Perreault

sapphires on the graves
by Scott Ferry
Glass Lyre Press (2024)

   Scott Ferry’s striking new book, sapphires on the graves, is a collection of 60 prose poems devoid of spacing and punctuated only by slashes and the occasional question mark, an appropriate choice for these compact, jewel-like offerings. The poet opens with a group of eight poems set in Guam where he is an outsider marked by his colonial whiteness and just learning how to “repeat my name at the gate / know how to sing it without lungs a coiled whip of sound.” He feels displaced from nature here, even his photographs of clouds failing to “capture the immense weight of their lifting,” wondering what he has done to deserve this brief respite under “fifty black butterflies breathless in a windless clutch” before returning stateside – “a manufactured forest with false lights and no tidal longing.” Even his wounded hand makes no impression on that “restless sea / where all is made level each day”; but something is gained, nevertheless when he wakes at home “still under water / the clock untidy in my hair / my eyes warm with reeffish and blood…all that has travelled has stopped in the bones / but is still flowing in the fluids like an unruly tide.”
   Ferry is a poet who recognizes the futility of trying to capture easy truths about our shared world, that his gift may be just to “stand at the edge of the forest and wait for all of the language to breathe itself quiet.” Such peace often arrives in dreams where “the feeling of being without a shell becomes soothing…the breeze now a sloping breeze over the bed”; this feels right in a life where the division between dreaming and waking seems almost irrelevant at times because what can a person really do? He has not “made anything mean anything besides what it already meant / some days it enough to witness / some days it is enough to listen and follow what speaks under the visible.” And besides, he is not a systematic philosopher creating a grand design: “it’s not as if i want an answer / i just want to open the gates within the gates and watch the tides retake.” This is a fitting response when attempts at writing are like wrestling sea snakes, “the wriggling ache of prayers / copper wings and bleeding gills / it is the song of them which is messy / my hands don’t really clean them as much as harmonize with their thrashing.” And yet, being human, he still holds ‘faith that beauty is truth / truth beauty / somewhere an adolescent takes a picture of something beautiful / thinks it will save him.” 
   This is a hope sometimes glimpsed through an easter mass: “they say all sin is washed away with a death / but we have not died….i hold my loved ones as the rain pours and we are washed regardless / forgiven regardless / of our innocent and dirty hands.” Redemption, though, is more often found in nature, “the unseen limbs reaching into the soil….stripped of memory / of memorized lines /the thick bark bodice shaking in the dew / the smell of dung and liver in the spring loam.” Elsewhere spring reminds him that “what is hanging from the vessels in my dark body is a reflection of god’s song / a tender glare of a mirror /a leaf opening inside a leaf / a small paper of sounds i can eat….the smell of something almost born.”
   Such moments are hard to hold onto, however; in a world with “desks full of dead children / the sky full of black fire” Ferry can remember how “many times in my days i have been blind / and then awoken / and sometimes the darkness was kinder.” It is so hard to hold onto a belief when he is driving his car that “heaven is the place we are / a place of half-eaten pancakes / a cat yowl in the mirror to the boy singing in the back….a wide wide shine on the wheel in my hands.” But sometimes life does become a dance, and “there is the charleston of wind and plum blossomed arms from knee to nimble root / there is the ronde chasse of tides and sweeping moons / there is the bolero and the bleeding as i stretch to god.”
   What bends Ferry this way most often is a palpable closeness to his family, a willingness to “respond appropriately to the firecloud of conversation / there are people who deserve reaching toward even in the red air.” He wrestles with his young son “primordial and sudden….under our sterile languages…and find each other…reformed with elemental grunts / closer than words can tell.” He can rejoice that his daughter is self-healing and not cruel, that his child speaks of the light that surrounds them, that his wife is “a wet nose on my neck / a more advanced creature than me / all the hidden languages of her soft breath…her voice pearl and smoke…my split ribs still warm.” 
   These are poems of deep pain but also of blessing. There are graves everywhere and inevitable, but there are still jeweled moments of joy. At its best, the world is a place “where we can be broken and leaking and still be whole, i can bring my precious one into this water…a safe breath…we are all crushed children / holy seeds lifting and amethyst wrists.” It is a place we can come to know ourselves unexpectedly – “on video i see the girl in me…a moonish twin in my limbs…she is a soft thing in me that has survived…sang into rivers and oceans my many glowing tears / at night when I feel frightened / she holds my bones together in her hands.”
   Sixty poems, most of them just a few breaths long. Carefully crafted jewels. You owe it to yourself to hold them in your hand.

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George Perreault most recent collection, lie down as you were born, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books. He has recently been short-listed for the Charles Simic Poetry Prize.