Flood Bloom, by Caroline Cabrera (A Review by Tony Mancus)

$14.95/102 pgs.

The first thing that I encountered when starting to read Caroline Cabrera’s new book of poetry, Flood Bloom, out from H_NGM_N Books, was the honeycombing that acts as endpaper and splits the book in half. The walls of a honeycomb seem like they could be a productive organic and partially decomposing frame for what’s happening through the book. The stuff of memory is being collected chewed up, and regurgitated into form. What’s left is a fortifying byproduct and a well-crafted casing. A hive itself and bees actually arrive early on and with them come the speaker’s worry that the collective is mucked with an “f”:

The people in town are afraid of bees we are in a hive my
big concern is colony collapse disorder everything leaves

(“Movement” – 4)

We are left, but thankfully not alone and the longing that’s semi-present throughout the book is productive precisely because all is not terribly lost. Things are just a bit foggy, and this is OK.

Cabrera deftly plays around with perceptive angles and the occasional use of “we” helps define the speaker more sharply. The author relies on declarative statements, often repeating sentence beginnings, but the effect of this repetition and construction is insistence that we as readers follow her very stable eye, and what that eye sees even though it changes as it’s seen.

I see boats, the wakes they make.

I see ghosts of clouds moving beneath me,

(“Flight Language” – 20)

The lessons presented to and through this speaker are mutable, imbued with the press and pressure: of family, of varied relationships, and the distortion that memory renders. But they’re lessons that we all have our own windows into, which makes these poems easy to enter, but not simple.

The speaker here is faulty and observant, concerned and productive – aware that in her existence and insistence, she poses problems to the world she’s looking at and into. She relies on certain key images/touchstones often elements of the natural word including the hydrangea in Tallulah (p.26) and the “pictures of hydrangeas” sent to the speaker in Robot Love Diorama (p. 42). There are seven poems in the book that contain Diorama in their titles, which points to the nature of both the task the author is engaged in as well as the authorial act that’s occurring. Cabrera is bent on showing us well built and distinctly crafted scenes. But as we are swept along what is stable becomes slightly undone, as does the speaker, as she begins to show herself as well aware of her own failings:

they see me talking but don’t know any of the
words I use I start to question my language too I say
catalog catalog catalog until I’m sure that’s wrong my
ear is too involved in the vowels

(“Grey Frame” – 43)

This failing is a human one, but it is also something that is particular enough for Cabrera to own it.

At first, I’d misread a number of the lines throughout the book as purely two dimensional, the ones that register a bit flatter in their diction and sound. This was troublesome. It was also my mistake. The work that some of the more “plain” pieces are doing, especially in the first half of the book, is building a world and a platform from which Cabrera can spring up and away from in the second half.. The pooling of the flood gives way in its silt to rich ground, which feeds the blooms. By the end of the collection, when we encounter the lines:

We seem to throw our voices all about the cavern
as you climb out you are thinking
how have we avoided drowning up to this point
I am certain we are everything we think

(“This is Something – 67)

Not only do we hear the echoes bouncing around the cave (moving from Plato on down), but these final lines are believable, hefty, and in my opinion, well earned. They cast light on all of the “real” things from the first half of the book that might have seemed slightly mundane in passing and turned them into composite parts (possibly compartments) of the speaker(s) that have been created through dis- and re-membering. Throughout the book what remains possible – what can be – outstrips what is:

the hardest part is knowing when to reconfigure my
eyelashes grow and grow they could be a way to generate
wind I could be a windmill

(“I Am a Natural Wonder” – 21)

This sense of becoming, of assemblage through thought, has turned this “reality” into something plainly surprising—a collected whole here that gathers and bursts, that floods and blooms, as it may have always been or may always be before us.

Tony Mancus is the author of three chapbooks: Bye Land (Greying Ghost Press); Bye Sea (Tree Light Books); and Diplomancy (Horse Less Press). In 2008 he co-founded Flying Guillotine Press with Sommer Browning. They make small books. He works as a quality assurance specialist and a writing instructor and lives in northern Virginia with his wife Shannon and their two yappy cats.