Review: Lily Brown’s The Renaissance Sheet
Lily Brown
The Renaissance Sheet
Octopus Books, 2007
The Renaissance Sheet, Lily Brown’s debut chapbook recently released by Octopus Books, is composed of tightly crafted poems that range from the mundane to lightly surrealistic to disjointed observation. Many of Brown’s poems are characterized by short phrases, sentence fragments, and an awkward syntax which often allows for greater ambiguity in how the lines may be read. Brown also draws from a vocabulary that mixes older, archaic sounding phrases with the more common or pedestrian: “From my spot I think it odd that birds / don’t shit on us more often.” (from “Smaller Gulls Before”).
The poems exist in an imaginative landscape where “In January the hills / unbutton their pants.” In often concise language, Brown is able to capture sharp images and beauty as well as define relationships and create tension, like in the final lines of “Nobody is in Cahoots with the Telephone Pole”:
We don’t speak: no one believes
one thing follows another:
the path between sun stalk
slicing wall
and wintered pavement
is deeply broken.
Sense this and I’ll love you.
I turn into full sight.
There is no body.
The pleasure of the poems comes from the disjunctiveness—the unexpected leap from one line to the next. These movements are especially successful in the poem “Turtle, Turtle, Loon.” where Brown abandons the non sequitors to return again to certain ideas—here the V for versus—and riffs on them: “You and I are busy locating / a fumarole for V. // Excise the move I made to you. / Turn V to vapor.”
The collection is a bit of a mixed bag, with some poems feeling slight, most notably “Computer Poem.” However, the more interesting pieces outweigh the slighter pieces, making The Renaissance Sheet an enjoyable read.
Gina Myers
