Review: How to Have a Day by Megan McShea (reviewed by CarlaJean Valluzzi)

How to Have a Day

by Megan McShea

200 pages

Ink Press Productions, 2015

$12.00

http://www.inkpressproductions.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It’s not as if marking the moment would mean something, but it would make it seem to mean something^1.

 

This is a book.
This is a door.
This is a . . . day.

 

Opening this book is like finding a big house all lit up at the end of a long, dark road.  Approach.  Climb the porch steps, worn from those who’ve ventured here before, and notice the single moth circling the bare bulb.  Place an inquisitive hand on the brass knob and twist.  This is when you’ll realize time might be parted like waves².

You’re not going to find anyone you know on the other side, but you might hear their echo.  And there are so many rooms, each one brimming with the kind of details we often refer to (mistakenly) as small.  Small things rarely get their due.  Consider the atom.  Each autonomous small contributes itself to the all, and each poem in Megan McShea’s collection, How to Have a Day (Ink Press Productions, 2015), does so with an unassuming fortitude—the result is a tiny tome that murmurs from the back pocket, vibrates on its own seductive frequency, you’ve just got to train your ear to hear it.  Urge yourself toward a calculated lingering³ so as not to miss one of the constant oiled references⁴, a chirp trigger⁵ or a still breaking {sic} out⁶. 

Soon, the walls have fallen away and now there is only one large room, which must be round because nothing is hidden in a corner—every totem is humbly on display: pigeon toes⁷ and thimbles⁸, a rewarding oyster⁹ and a broke (not broken) candelabra¹⁰.  A slight non-native tension blooms in the cracks between visions.

An acute awareness of the passing of time becomes apparent, in and out of varying contexts, without the sense of a struggle against it.  On the contrary, its untamability is embraced, exalted even.  The tables and devices that mete it out are public, irrefutable¹¹ harbingers of the hapless gaps . . . the trick that jogs the memory¹².

A travelogue of dailies is compiled: sweating, eating, bathing, driving, dancing; so suggestive within the ring of its miniature ambiguities¹³; so many blanks to recognize and name, to fill and carry away.

The past, the culprit culprit¹⁴, is a constant companion here, too.  It hangs in the heat of the afternoon, or just after a rainstorm, hoping to be cultivated into an unpollution, a chance redemption.  Every seed in the yard has told on us in olden times¹⁵, and we are feeling the effects of their words ring true now, perhaps for the first time . . .

Sometimes it takes a parade to remind us¹⁶.

Enjoy the moments, friends, pass they will—be living, be alive, because these are them: the thes we can’t help anticipating! Take note of the patterns on walls that were always there¹⁷! Get higher in rarefied air¹⁸!  Listen without speaking to each little leaf as it falls¹⁹!

If all else fails, use the juggle coin to buy your way out²⁰.

 

 Poems Quoted:

1. Sacre vache!
2. How to have a day · 1
3. How to have a day · 3
4. History
5. Trying to be informative
6. A bit swollen in the pretend-area
7. How to have a day · 1
8. Headmeat
9. History
10. Busted
11. Actuality prayer
12. Sacre vache!
13. Trying to be informative
14. How to have a day · 2
15. Sacre vache!
16. How to have a day · 2
17. Patterns
18. In rooms
19. Progress
20. Plumb function

 

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CarlaJean Valluzzi