Here in the Ice House by Jeanne Stauffer-Merle

Jeanne Stauffer-Merle’s masterful collection Here in the Ice House is the “negative space,” an end-of-days world, an expressionistic series of tone poems with an isolated speaker who moves through a frozen landscape: where the tree “is the coffin of embryo,” the house can be “a square white tooth,” a daughter can be exhorted to “dine on my dead,” and there is a “black sun” and an “under side of light.” In a stunning final poem, of those in the ice house and the “dog people” who live behind its walls, the imagery verges on the Kabbalistic, where “the ice people are the broken words of a god no longer discernable.” Imagine an apocalyptic Wallace Stevens and you have some sense of what this haunting world of lies built on ice might feel like.

–Sharon Dolin

Here in the Ice House we find the dog people and the ice people, night and its twin, body and light, word and silence. Here we flirt with aphasia and don the rain’s skin, we “mute the grind” and “hair the sun.” And from the soft corners of this house sings a voice that glories even as it acknowledges its own ruination – of body, of life, of language. Here a body is a world, and the world a body, “Units of sky-bladder and world-kidney.” Both hold secrets, speak in tongues lavish and wild and crystalline, tongues transformative and fugitive. I have inhabited the Ice House. I have emerged changed.

–Claire Hero

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]