BOOK REVIEW

Daywork: A Review

By Susan Wheatley     May 24, 2024




Daywork
Jessica Fisher
Milkweed Editions (2024)
104 pp. $16.00 (paperback)

Courage comes in many disguises. In her new book, Daywork (Milkweed 2024), Jessica Fisher takes us into layers of grief. While poems inevitably confront their writer’s own preoccupations, poems at their most fundamental also do what Fisher’s do—bring aid and comfort to others, whether that is the poet’s intention or not. This is another way of saying that art is relational, something to be experienced by others. It is one thing to make this commonplace statement, and it is quite another to see a poet carry it out with the beauty, intensity, and craftsmanship that Fisher deploys in Daywork.

Louise Glück selected Fisher’s first book, Frail-Craft, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The phrase “Frail-Craft” comes from a story told by Jacques Lacan in which a man is invited onto a fisherman’s craft, “together in risk,” pondering the ocean’s depths from the precarious safety of the surface. Fisher, who teaches at Williams College, probed the depths again in her second book, Inmost, which won the Nightboat Poetry Prize. In Daywork, Fisher calls upon her experience living in Rome, surrounded by art and ruins, as she mourns a dear friend’s death, raises her children in the midst of horrific news of school massacres in the United States, and asks “must this once again be my subject” (“Morality Play”).

The first poem in Daywork, “Shadow Play,” raises the questions at the heart of the book:

                   Under what sun
were you born, did you grow.
Under what king, what tyrant.

What window. What door. The four
horsemen, the seven sisters, at rest.
Whether a thousand years, five thousand,

is a long time.

The poem continues in these taut tercets, asking:

Who fed you, a hand extending
the spoon. What fed you, music,
art or light. Was there an empty room,

shadows cast upon the floor,
the boards liquid with sunshine,
and was that how you imagined

the soul . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Did you think about it at all.

The last tercets, with their end-rhymes, evoke the tangible things of the world with a “trace” of human connection:

A little gate breaks the view.
Beyond, the beyond,
given as a stripe of blue.

This is how I came to know you,
as a smudge or trace—thumbprint
on the potsherd, residue in the flask.

The idea of residue returns in “Speedwell,” one of the loveliest poems in the book. The poem proceeds with quiet rhymes in quatrains as the speaker attempts to manage her grief after a friend’s death. The speaker admits:

I was looking for a metaphor.
For someone who knows the way.
On the shelf a book titled The Sight of Death.
On the shelf a little bottle to keep age away.

The speaker finds the metaphor of the speedwell, a flower that would be pinned “onto the beloved’s coat / before a journey.” Still, “[e]very death takes // a body; it’s hard to know what it leaves.”

The poem alludes to Whitman’s “The Compost,” in which the grieving speaker questions, then perhaps accepts, that spring flowers grow from compost that itself “form’d part of a sick person.” In Fisher’s poem, the speaker asks herself why she should not accept Whitman’s impulse to take “the flowers as proof that nothing dies.” Still, the speaker is not fully comforted by the metaphor of renewing compost, though “this is what the poem’s after, after all.” The poem ends with a cell phone ringing in a handbag, unanswered, and asks whether the lost loved one will “feel like that calling from far away.”

As in her earlier books, Fisher excels at writing about visual art. The powerful four-page poem, “The Slaughter of the Innocents, 1376,” is based on the painting in Rome which depicts Herod’s murder of children. As the mother in the poem looks at the painting’s graphic images, her young children ask “to see what you see.” The mother lifts the smaller child but allows him to see only the part of the painting where a baby is nursing, “so as to lure his gaze away / from the lure of carnage—” The family’s outing in Rome had been full of beauty. The mother finds it “strange, then, to be caught up in this / world of grief a few millimeters thick.” She can’t shake the thought of the artist, “whoever he was, // painting with a single gesture / murderer and bereaved mother.”

The book’s title poem, “Daywork,” takes its name from the seams in frescoes, called giornata, Italian for “a day’s work.” The poem opens with a curator guiding the speaker to “Close your eyes,” so the speaker can feel a seam, which is “raised like a scar, running through the fresco which marks / where one day’s work ended, the next began.” Like the speaker with her eyes closed, a horse in the fresco is “seen yet blind.” The speaker thinks of her midwife seeing the speaker’s child before she herself could. The poem turns, though, from the seeming helplessness of not seeing—or not being seen—to making oneself “the neck,” which then controls the head. The speaker will turn the head to her “advantage, / will make you see what is wrought through me—” What is wrought? Art; a child from childbirth; the poems in this book.

Fisher’s poems return again and again to the act of seeing. In the ekphrastic gem, “Sunset Corner,” Fisher focuses on one of Helen Frankenthaler’s Color Field paintings (which I suggest the reader look up). The speaker finds a seam in the painting, echoing the seam in the fresco of “Daywork”:

Rust spreads, there is a seam,
green coming through again,

a single line makes the horizon,
past which we cannot see—

The poem turns from the act of seeing toward “the movement / of not thinking,” then toward “air as the voice is an air, / in and out of bodies it moves.” The poem concludes with a forward but indefinite motion: “children running ahead, and the mind / borne forth that way, to no end—”

In the book’s epigraph, the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin cites “[o]ne law of fate,” that people “Should know each other so that when / Silence returns, there will also be a language.” Whether it is the silence we fear upon the loss of a loved one, the attentive silence of reading or listening to another, or the quiet contemplation of a work of art, language will connect us. Fisher takes us into dark places, but she does not leave us alone. Like the villagers in “Peal,” who know that winter snows will collapse their roofs, Fisher leaves a “hole,” an “unblinking eye,” that she, like the villagers, can pass a ladder through. The ladder will be used “to repair the damage” when spring comes. Warmth can come from a human action: even “a stone / held in the hand will warm. / The same goes for a bone” (“Shadow Play”). Reassurance can come from the knowledge, even after the fact, that “the beloved lay beside you and / spoke, though you were asleep and did not hear” (“Listen”). These are the last lines the book.

Daywork’s beautiful cover is a photo of a fresco of the goddess, Flora, which was found in the town of Stabiae near Pompeii. Flora is picking flowers against a deep green background. The photo is cropped and reversed from the actual fresco, with the effect of highlighting the fresco’s seam. Seams signal both separation and connection, and aptly for this book, the fresco’s seam, after the passage of millennia and the eruption of Vesuvius, provides evidence of “daywork”: an artist at her craft in the necessary work of connection.



​​Daywork by Jessica Fisher

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SUSAN WHEATLEY’s reviews of poetry books have been published or are forthcoming in the PN Review (UK) and Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems have been published in Stand (UK), The Cincinnati Review, Seattle Review, and other magazines. She lives in Cincinnati, OH, where she practices probate law.