Frail Union by Nylah Lyman
“I read this collection as much as a feminist manifesto as a personal one; a love letter to all women who secretly know their strength and quietly go about the work of attending to their ambitions and desires.”
There’s nothing frail about Nylah Lyman’s first collection of poetry. Rather, Frail Union (Encircle Publications) shines with steel-will, iron persistence . . . horse-sense. (“Making a Field.”) It brought me to tears as much for its craft as its subject matter: a lung transplant and its aftermath, the dissolution of a marriage, and the similarities between the two (“Grafting as Metaphor”). Just as the main character reclaims the land she farms, she reclaims her life—sowing, feeding, watering, and weeding her dreams until they manifest.
Lyman’s bond with nature and her capacity to describe both its beauty and brutality (“Acceptance,” “To The Bear Hunter With Dogs,” “Thoughts on Pigs and Goats,”) is as palpable as a “taproot probing a dark vein of earth, performing subterranean miracles.” Her use of color (chartreuse blisters, pink vigor, ashen snow—how better to describe the palette of “Boston in March”?) is as exquisite as her sure-footed instinct for metaphor and simile (The cabin you helped build from thick red pines / rots like an old tooth in the encroaching forest . . . receding into the soft gumline / of discarded leaves and moss. (“Making a Field’).
I read this collection as much as a feminist manifesto as a personal one; a love letter to all women who secretly know their strength (I am a red ampersand / frying pan between my teeth, hot brick in my fist (“Menstrual Poems”), and quietly go about the work of attending to their ambitions and desires (The sea is a closed blue door I stumble toward, cloud-blind but determined (“Sojourn”). She even makes room at the table—and in the closet—for the woman who replaces her and becomes pregnant with her ex’s child, understanding that one day, she too will covet smooth skin, fine hair, skinny hips, but in exchange . . . acquire rhythm, / the rings of her heart / contracting and expanding / with seasons of want and plenty . . . ruled by an irresistible domestic moon / she does not yet understand (“X and Y”).
In titles such as “Poetry as Healing” “Writing as Therapy,” and “Spiritual Workers in a Physical World,” the narrator resolves to heal both her heart—The heart must be strong to go on beating after catastrophe. / It must be stubborn and brave, a mule heart with a big kick (“Transplantation Procedures”)—and her health through her art. Indeed, many of these poems can be read as glorious Ars Poetica—rising up from the spectral depths, straining to grasp that first lustrous, elusive thought (“Surfacing”).
In a poem about grafting tomatoes which harkens back to Frail Union’s title, she writes It was impossible to guess which ones would take, which would fail. The successful unions formed / a seamless bond, put down roots, flourished in the field.” This collection of poems, grafted together through many years of hard-won experience, is a page-turner that flourishes in the field of contemporary poetry, standing out as distinctly as a solitary sunflower rose from the middle / of the grass like a small yellow sun (“Rising”).