“Currents,” the first poem in Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s new collection, “Purchase,” crystalizes an experience she had of contradictory emotions, one that took place on the Cornell campus.
“This poem sprang from a moment when, terrified, angry, perplexed, seeking escape, I walked a trail on campus,” said Van Clief-Stefanon, associate professor of literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Sitting in a remote area, watching a stream create those ice flowers the poem mentions, I felt simultaneously awed by their formation, by a beauty I felt deserved attention, and frustrated by the cruelty that had driven me to a place I hoped no one would find me.”
Even though she wanted to be alone, another person soon came along the trail, a graduate student doing research, gathering samples from the water. At first, Van Clief-Stefanon said, she felt resentful, “but the crystals were too beautiful not to point out.”
She asked him to describe his work and followed him back to his lab, where they had a great conversation.
“When I left the lab, I wept,” Van Clief-Stefanon said. “Hoping to get away from people, I’d found what felt like a gift and a vexation. When abusive dynamics interfere with our capacity, not to feel, but to share, can I both celebrate the natural world and grieve our failure to picture a more loving world?”
In the poems in “Purchase,” Van Clief-Stefanon, a National Book Award finalist for her 2009 collection “] Open Interval [ ,” seeks consolation for grief by turning to specific sources of beauty that, like the “delicate line of ice blossoms” she describes in “Currents,” deserve attention.
“The poems work through grief over ubiquitous devices of the surveillance state, over unspeakable conditions, distant relationships, lost parents, historical trauma,” Van Clief-Stefanon said. “Where is there space to be vulnerable, to be soft? Drawing on a song, a quilt, a mink, a calla lily, the Bible, whatever form the poem takes, I try to picture a place where a woman may find some peace.”
Composed in Ithaca, the poems range in their geography from the Finger Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean to a flood in rural Kentucky and in form from essay-like prose poems to an erasure poem to a poem titled with punctuation (“:—:”) resembling a stitch.
The poems find peace in the natural world, in the biblical gospels and psalms, and in spaces where things are made by hand – a kitchen, a garden, a sewing room.
“A sewing notion can inspire a poem: the eyes for fastening hooks,” Van Clief-Stefanon said. “Or the broiled fish and honeycomb in Luke 24:42. Sand under a microscope. The ocean. The lift equation. The beautiful pink color of a worm in the garden.”
Van Clief-Stefanon’s writing practice, collected in “Purchase,” echoes the repetitions of nature.
“Seasons keep cycling. The sun comes up every day,” she said. “I keep writing poetry.”
