Sapphires on the Graves
by Scott Ferry
Publisher: Glass Lyre Press (November 13,2024)
Paperback: 70 pages
ISBN-13: 979-8991667302
Item Weight: 5.9 ounces
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A primary feature of literary romanticism was the discovery of the self as a subject to explore in poetry. Today, poets are, to a greater or lesser extent, still committed to that exploration. The poetic tools may be different, but the attempt is the same. We try to use poetry as a process, how the words emerge in our heads not from logical calculation but as the ungovernable product of imagination. These words are sought by us as we sit down with an intention to make a poem, but they come from somewhere beyond our intention. It is a space beyond our control and perhaps beyond ourselves. For 21st-century romantics, mapping that place of contradictory impulse and personal memory is the same task faced by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
The book begins with “guam,” a powerful sequence of eight poems. Ferry and his wife, daughter, and son have gone to Guam to visit his wife’s family. Travel, even if real, is often a metaphor for a movement into the unconscious. The poet/hero enters another culture or myth world from which he returns changed. Ferry does not emerge unscathed from his intrusion into Chamorro lands: on a swim, a piece of coral takes off most of the skin from his middle finger. Knowledge is not given for free. In a lesser collection, these Guam poems would be the climax of the book. Here, they are an introduction. They establish Ferry’s access to a dark interior world that collides, sometimes painfully, with the outside world of family and obligation. Ferry enters this other world in these initial poems, but it travels with him throughout the book. Perhaps, it was always there, and what he encountered in Guam was just a physical manifestation. Regardless, he is haunted by it, and much of what we, as readers, overhear is how he manages to cope.
I used the word “cope,” but poetry is not an easy therapy. If it heals, it heals by way of exposing us to the brutal and the ugly, to all the parts of ourselves and others that we wish we could pass over quickly. What is most moving in this collection is Ferry’s refusal to pretend that there are simple answers, that love or beauty can be experienced without the experience of their opposites. In the third section of “guam,” he shows us both:
the boonie dogs congregate on the corner of maimai road / creatures only the seasons own / one limps its back leg a swollen red fist / i ask my wife who grew up here if she still notices the clouds / gold stretching from shimmering bay to the rolling heights / she says not really / maybe sometimes / when i drive through chalan pago a rooster reclines in the road / his eyes searching for an escape his crushed legs can’t deliver / he seems to ask that i spare him but when i return an hour later through a gentle spit of rain / through tangantangan and paipai trees / the bird’s head no longer sees anything but has become a place for water and feather and iron to coalesce / i take pictures of clouds but none of them capture the immense weight or the lifting / every time i pass the corner i search for the limping dog without any faith that i will find any faith
The book’s title comes from the poem “Sparkle,” where Ferry takes the reader inside his need to mythologize as a way to understand himself. He recalls a time when this kind of life was not necessary for him, “back when i could just be unholy walking with the thunder and the broken psalms.” Now, however, “broken and faithless,” he “must collect each strand of light as it falls and weave it into my splayed chest.” Ferry tells us that he must do this because “i have to laugh with my children / because i have to show them there is music on the black waters / that there are sapphires on all the graves.”
Literary romanticism can also be a return to the poem as prophecy and the poet as prophet. Ferry is as unashamed of this role as William Blake or D.H. Lawrence. The role of the poet/prophet is to find a language for precisely those experiences and thoughts that are hardest, if not impossible, to put into words. As a result, prophetic books are difficult, and Sapphires on the Graves is not an exception. We can hear the echoes of backstories for the poems, but they are given to us as features of the poet’s interior being, not as a narrated series of events. The reader must explore the darkness with Ferry; we are not allowed to jump ahead to a position of stability and light; we are not allowed, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, to “get through Hell in a hurry….”
A great deal of the darkness in these poems is fear, fear that Ferry is not present for his children, or if he is present, that he is not the man he would like to be. He asks in “hush,” “when did everything become terrifying? / fear of fear of fear of fear / i am more afraid of the insects under my sleep than of the actual sting and swelling.” Later in the same poem, he questions, “i can comfort my children / why can i not comfort myself?” This is, in fact, the central question of the collection: if we allow ourselves to see the darkness that permeates our lives, if we are committed to that truth, how can we ever know whether we are truly good?
This is a problem inherent in romanticism, which exists in the space between our subjective consciousness and the contingent world full of wars and disease. Can our suffering, troubled world be redeemed by beauty, or is this only a fantasy? Ferry is in much the same position as Keats was in his famous ode. Keats acknowledges that old age and death will waste his generation, but the urn (“Cold Pastoral!”), an art that endures past human life, will still proclaim “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Ferry’s poem “romantics” reaffirms this faith, even as he reminds us of the darkness that challenges it:
i post pictures of roses on facebook / there are many times when the idea that beauty can heal helps me believe i am doing something / i post my words / maybe i need a dopamine hit when the likes come in / maybe i feel that the ghosts need to be naked against white / i don’t do much but listen to what haunts me / there is too much to write / endless connections under the loathing / the inside of the cave a carbon shell / citrine and alexandrite / there are many times when the smell of the words have no power / there are many times when the roses look much better in pixels / the grecian urn / love always in tension but always undigested / images frozen in a fake tableau / everything i should have felt or said or done / but the roses fall / the chances are deleted / ozymandias swallowed by sand / keats and shelley my first stars in a distant and sealed movie set / the scripts are fantastic but the actors die in a shakespearean fifth act but only in the second act / i still hold faith that beauty is truth / truth beauty / somewhere an adolescent takes a photo of something beautiful / thinks it will save him from the loss of all faith / the desks full of dead children / the sky full of black fire
Sapphires on the Graves is a book built around this juxtaposition, the poet’s love for his family and the beauty of this world on the one hand and the reality of injury, illness, depression, and death on the other. The challenge to Ferry, who in his daily life is a nurse working with veterans, is how to endure. Self-exploration is Ferry’s answer to that challenge, and the collection is evidence of his survival. The poet may not be healed or even reconciled to the world, but he does find a kind of triumph, a way of continuing and perhaps even a hope for healing. In the book’s final poem, “twin,” he discovers an anima figure in himself, a feminine other, and tells us:
she is a soft thing in me that has survived / she has grown flowers out of her many heads / flourished next to the archetypes and models of gender / sang into rivers and oceans my many glowing tears / at night when i feel frightened / she holds my bones together in her hands.
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Check out two poems by Scott Ferry, previously published in Cultural Daily