Scott Ferry
Sapphires on the Graves
Glass Lyre Press
Reviewer: Rebecca Patrascu
In Scott Ferry’s new collection, Sapphires on the Graves, form, format, and subject work together to create poetic montages, shifting collages of dreams, domestic scenes, and views of the subconscious mind. The opening lines of the first piece, “guam,” place readers immediately in a dreamscape and amid questions of identity:
two nights ago i fall into a building fall into mangrove and rust / with each floor i lose more of my name / last night the power sweeps off and my son leads me to where a white eyelid flutters through the taotaomona trees
“Guam” has eight sections that describe vivid natural and surreal landscapes. Like the rest of Ferry’s book, his tenth in six years, these are prose poems, written without capital letters or punctuation apart from question marks, with slashes and double slashes in lieu of line and stanza breaks. This style means that Ferry loses the impact of single-word lines or clever enjambments and forsakes the variety that traditional lineation provides for individual poems or a collection, but there are advantages to his approach. A different type of parsing is required, and liberated from considering the shape of poems on the page, the reader is free to sink into the text itself.
With its ubiquitous “i,” Sapphires on the Graves is more than anything an investigation of identity. The loss of name in the opening poem introduces an elusive self, a theme that is developed throughout the book. Ferry explores the dissolution of persona, as well as questions of God, faith, and existence. As he says in “guam,” “all night my identity skips from land to shore to ocean and back into lava,” and in “name,” “i never pretended to be extant.” This latter poem also opens and closes with “i didn’t come here to this place to explain who i am.” And indeed, Ferry does not explain. Instead, he explores with a persistent curiosity. In “flood,” he notes, “i want to know what is under the skin of this plate glass / under the rooted earth” and “it’s not as if i want an answer / i just want to open the gates within the gates and watch the flood retake.” Uncertainty is a given. He even tells us that he has no faith that he will find faith.
The “i” takes on several roles, including poet as mouthpiece. In “bio,” Ferry notes, “i don’t have a body just a voice.” In “silver,” he says, “the only thing i have is a hole inside a body,” and in “waterpark,” he reports, “i am not the clean one but i have a voice.”
Other poems feature a domestic self: Ferry driving children home from school, folding laundry, brushing teeth, mowing the lawn, falling asleep among a concert of his family’s snoring. His role as father is especially prominent, and many vignettes feature his daughter and young son. In one poem, the boy befriends the moon and must be distracted when his “proxy god” disappears. In another, he reacts to a bright morning by saying, “close the sun!” Innocence is countered by anxiety over the children’s vulnerability. There are insect stings, strep throat, sleepless nights, all fueling Ferry’s work. In “azithromycin,” he tells us:
these are the ghosts fevering my script / this is the horror of a father listening to his child groan / this is what lifts me unbodied to the page to write / my throat full of false flames / my fingers full of meddling bones
There is a tenderness and vulnerability throughout this collection supported by the poet’s willingness to enter uncertainty. It is probably not a coincidence that question marks are the only punctuation in the book. We see this especially in “hush,” when Ferry asks, “when did everything become terrifying? / fear of fear of fear of fear.” The poet’s vulnerability also extends to questions of faith. “[Why] am i looking for god inside this recycling of masks and laughtracks?” he asks. In “sparkle,” he tells us, “there was a time when i wouldn’t notice the flash and weft of sun on water / back when i didn’t need to notice god in the wind … but now i know i am broken and faithless.”
Throughout much of Sapphires, Ferry’s observations about faith are couched in beauty. A good example is “last,” which opens with greening trees, and continues:
thoughts corpulent as wry comedy written on limbs / the paragraphs are pulsing / a mosaic of parenchyma / paraphrased from lightlands to this windy shrill of spring / the inside of my prayers are piano notes / oboes cascading through windows / but it must be an illusion because i don’t pray / but what is hanging from the vessels in my dark body is a reflection of god’s song / a tender glare of a mirror / a leaf opening inside a leaf / a small paper of sounds i eat and manifest in the air / threads / the smell of something almost born
Other poems in the book contain metaphoric limbs and imagery from Ferry’s medical training. When his son tries to open Ferry’s eyes, “tiny fingers separate the lids softly like new wounds.” In another poem, “the muons ring the semi-moist bodies and calcified teeth in a theater of consonance.” In “imposter,” a bag contains “microbes and dandelion seeds” and “wet and dehisced” books.
Contradictions co-exist in Sapphires with equal validity. And while shame plays a role in the book (“i am alive again and the first thing i feel is shame,” Ferry writes in “sin”), this collection is more ontological musing than existential crisis. It’s also an entertaining dive into dreamscapes, some of which suggest routine anxiety while others point to a thriving imagination. In “verdict,” Ferry writes, “i show up to the race in work clothes and wrong shoes.” In “serpent,” the dreamer runs over a plastic snake that may be his own intestines, the snake eats Adam and Eve, cigar-smoking baboons laugh in a mezzanine, and the dreamer drives a tonka truck, smiting “this and that with cartoon fire.”
The allure of Sapphires on the Graves comes partly from Ferry’s compelling stream-of-consciousness and partly from his more commonplace preoccupations. We, too, dream, have fears and anxieties, and want to protect children. The book’s format provides immediacy but also creates tension: we are in the ever-present present, but the slashes are like the click of a camera shutter, reminding us of the passage of time. Ferry himself resists this momentum toward an inevitable end, even bargaining with it in “why”: “i don’t remember buying this ticket for my own slow decay,” “no i am not ready for the credits / the ushers aren’t watching / let’s pretend we are new and sneak into the light.” With the lack of a final period in the final poem of the book, it is possible to believe that the credits haven’t started yet, and that Ferry still has much to discover and share.
