Life Woven into Lines in ‘An Arm Fixed to a Wing’ https://ift.tt/lUeb0jf
An Arm Fixed to a Wing is a new collection of poems by Mississippi writer Olivia Clare Friedman. Friedman published her debut collection of poetry, The 26-Hour Day in 2015, a short story collection in 2017 (Disasters in the First World, Grove Press/Black Cat) and a poetic novel in 2022 (Here Lies, Grove Atlantic). An Arm Fixed to a Wing represents Friedman’s return to poetry after a decade building her family and her career as a professor of creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.
In a February 2018 interview with the Bennington Review, Friedman discusses her beginnings as a poet in the context of writing prose: she mentions that she used to “[approach] poetry via language, via syntax. That first line, and then the next. The sound and texture of it. I wasn’t approaching poetry via characters, via people. The people in my poems were mostly the lyric I and the lyric you.” An Arm Fixed to a Wing reflects Friedman’s continued growth as a writer and increased comfort with narrative. The collection begins in the lyric form, but quickly branches out to explore points of view, sometimes at length.
In the collection’s first poem, “Making Your Milk and Reading Valery,” Friedman’s first speaker struggles to balance a book on her knees while breast-feeding. She imagines her child’s future as she is carried away into the world of her text. This new mother’s shifting selfhood and her habit of vivid dreams (“Sleeping”) worked for me as a subtle framing device, unifying the rest of the work’s broad thematic and formal range over forty-five poems in five sections.
The only section of the collection with a title, “Camera Poems,” is an eight-poem narrative about an LA film actor. Joan’s director pushes her to uncomfortable extremes of self-awareness even as Joan slides into increasing self-isolation and anonymity offscreen, a harrowing journey into the self from a third-person perspective reminiscent of entertainment-industry procedurals like La La Land and GLOW. However, Friedman’s vulnerable protagonist finds salvation through her own courage and the love of her family. Friedman’s own career as a TV actor may have informed the technical precision of “Camera Poems”; Friedman was sixteen years old when she first appeared onscreen as Kelly Sims, filming over 70 episodes of Lifetime’s Any Day Now from 1998-2002.
An Arm Fixed to a Wing’s four elegies call for hope and action amid statements of grief and confusion. “Elegy for Your Contrition” describes the “great guilt” of letting “turning away / mean nothing”. “Elegy for Gone Sounds” demands that the listener “Turn off all music,” but diverges from Auden’s old demand to “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” when the speaker begins to describe “the first few notes / of a tune” returning out of the quiet:
[…] From where?
Me, possibly. I imagine
I am walking to rich ground.
I am walking to the center
Of my own ear.
An Arm Fixed to a Wing’s poems of motherhood, “Camera Poems,” and elegies are interspersed with intimate portraits of social moments. Dialogue reigns in domestic scenes as well as scenes between casual acquaintances and even strangers (“Katherine”, “Wanda”, and the voyeuristic “Eating Alone”). Dreamlike mental wanderings while sitting on a train (“Tuesday’s Train”) and lucid dreams like that of “Friends and Strangers” contribute to the collection’s miscellany of time-bending and self-reflection.
Friedman’s voice explores characters like an actor, or like a novelist, but often positions her speakers amid other works and in the literary universe like a verse technician and professor. Reflections on big topics are often mediated by descriptions of her speakers’ reading or creative process: “Reading in Florence” describes a speaker looking up from a book. In “When My Reverence Is Idle, I Stand Stunned,” the poem from which the collection’s title is drawn, the speaker contemplates both how statues are made and arts’ accessibility, as “glass boats take marble / Gabriels to walled cities.” A fictional community’s interaction with a bronze automaton, something between Talos and a Muse (“Dream of The Valley”) which is perhaps constructed by the speaker of another poem (“I Build A Machine“). The collection’s interpersonal focus keeps these conceptual devices grounded in narratives and experiences.
Diverse as her poems are, the voice and tone of An Arm Fixed to a Wing remain kind, clear, and firmly grounded in the allusive literary world of a creator and mother reflecting on her life’s projects. It is a mature collection that reflects an interdisciplinary writer’s return to her native language of poetry.
POETRY An Arm Fixed to a Wing
By Olivia Clare Friedman
LSU Press
Published February 10, 2025
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