In Springtime, by Sarah Blake, reviewed by Trevor Ruth
“If you tell a bird that a heart is like a bird without wings, she will tell you it is broken because it doesn’t have wings.” Such is the poignant and contemplative phrasing of Sarah Blake’s In Springtime, a long-form narrative poem that depicts the struggles of an unnamed human, lost in the exile of the forest with their animal companions. No, this is not The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Instead, our dramatis personae for this collection include the person (our main subject), a pregnant horse, the spirit of a dead bird, a mouse, and I think a snake at one point. We interact with the person, the horse, and the dead bird the most, though the mouse tries desperately to be a part of the story too. What exactly is the story? Base survival. The human subject (or rather, you, given that the narrative is written in second person) must determine whether or not they are able to coexist with their animal brethren, or if they are destined to die in the wilderness. Across the span of four days, we are introduced to the mystery and myth of the natural world through the human’s interaction with each of these creatures and their supposed interconnectedness.
As a linear narrative, In Springtime is still rather nonsensical; it does not try to have a plot apart from perhaps the human subject seeing the horse’s pregnancy through. Initially, I wondered if this book wasn’t Blake’s response to Northrop Frye’s green world; a naturalistic space where change is meant to occur in the heart and mind of the character. The elements are all there: at times, it feels as if the story—what story there is—takes place in an ancient atmosphere. The formatting of the poetry and the adherence to the natural world and all of its metaphysical properties, like bathing in a river or creating makeshift graves for the dead with one’s bare hands, give the book a postmodern Romanesque quality; the isolation that the subject goes through is without a doubt self-inflicted and perhaps fugitive in nature: “In the next dream you dig in the same place and find a gun. You’ve shot someone. You weren’t supposed to return to this place where you hid the gun.” The victim of this person’s crime, in my mind, is obviously the bird. Whether that bird is symbolic of someone—or something— else is hard to tell but there is no doubt that its presence acts as the greatest detriment to the person’s struggle, as they are consistently haunted by its presence, and thus haunted by the presence of death.
Even under their originally published titles of “In a Wood, with Clearings, it’s Spring,” I fail to find any semblance of the season presented. Perhaps it relates to the heavy use of the forest setting and the cold, earthy descriptors along with the grimy environment but often Blake’s writing does very little to inspire, with few explanations for its dour voice. “He or she will have the largest eyes of any land mammal./And he or she—foal, baby, dearest—will grow to dread even the starry nights, how they’re caught only in glimpses.” Whether this tonal decision is used to reject the norms of springtime poetry or whether we are supposed to look at life with a kind of anger and fear through the poetry itself is up to the reader. Regardless, nothing inspires hope or rejuvenation in the reading of this poem. I assume this is intentional, given the in-between-ness of our human subject’s existence in what is certainly a kind of limbo. What the human subject (or you) is meant to gain from their experience in the wood is uncertain.
Perhaps the person is feeling guilty for having committed a murder and wants to help the horse see its pregnancy through as a kind of atonement. The sad reality, however, is that the person was completely unnecessary when it came to the actual birth, “You have to look at the nursing foal to have any real sense of well-being.” Again, this is not exactly uplifting (it is not supposed to be), but it is a very realistic outcome. There is something rather heartbreaking though poignant about the person’s attempt to assert its importance to the horse’s offspring; like a parent who tries to be a part of your life after neglecting you for most of your childhood. It’s important to note that while the book emphasizes realism, it isn’t nihilistic. Nor is the tone overly dismal and harsh with its realism, in fact the tone is quite magical at times. How can it not be? There’s a ghost bird who can travel into outer space if it wanted to. I even find the image of the mouse curling itself up into the person’s chest rather romantic.
As a side note, I applaud the decision to include the illustrations by artist Nicky Arscott in the book’s final pages; there’s a certain ancient quality to them that—like the collection itself—comes off as abstract but sacred, apart from one image of a horse that is more like a lost creepypasta.
To say that I was changed by In Springtime would be a lie, but there’s a kind of brilliance to its storytelling that is worth revisiting and re-examining, like an old philosophical metaphor that gets lost in the forest of its own imagination. Aplomb with an intellect to rival Ralph Waldo Emerson, Blake continues to prove how naturalism puts us in our place and reminds us of our relevance in the continuous reimagining of the human.
Sarah Blake, In Springtime, Wesleyan University Press, 2023