It’s hard to tell what is common knowledge in poetry anymore. I ask my undergraduate students if they’ve heard of T. S. Eliot, and two people raise their hands. So to think of comparing Robyn Schiff’s work to Marianne Moore’s, I realize this might inform a certain group of readers who went to college anytime before 2006. Same thing for alluding to William Butler Yeats’s “gyre” that turns and turns. And yet, to understand the mechanics of Robyn Schiff’s work, or at least the books published up to 2026, when I’m writing this review, is to understand the mechanics of twisting, and with the linguistic torque resulting from enjambment. For Schiff, what some might consider monumental feats of logic (combining, say, the dramatics of the Oresteia with an issue the poet has with a neighbor’s gardening over the property line) is merely the mechanics of a sentence, an easy pivot from one idea to the next that feels naturally stated within this syntax. Swirling, à la Yeats, but with the centrifugal force tethered solidly on the personal.
I would argue, however, that this centrifugal device is as much a poetic mode in A Woman of Property as it is concept related to the relationship the poet has with whatever she’s referring to as property. Because one of the foundations for this book involves a critique of the capitalist terminology that contributes to “ownership.” What is it to own? How close does the owned object exist to the owner? What instinctive urges are satisfied when owning something? And in the spirit of Marianne Moore, how can sentences and elided subject matters and poetic perspective operate within a poem to feel like and conceptually be like owning something. For instance, the stories about being pregnant, of having children, what is the child in terms of property? An implicit question that I find one of the book’s most disturbing considerations. Because it feels so inexplicable. Or uncontainable.
Just like when living among the propertied (I really enjoy "A Hearing" for its documentation of that strange feeling when a neighbor starts to infringe upon your life, which seems to comment in some way on what that life, to others, should look like (as though the neighbor is more mature and should be instructing the speaker on how she needs to live her life)). I would say this area is, at least to my memory, what makes this book unique from other Schiff books. The personal is so present. And, in fact, it becomes the occasion for the swirl. An emotion like this, or an encroachment on the personal like this, that is rooted in a much more recognizable real moment, is not normal. And that is precisely what is at stake here.
But there is also this unusual flattening in the poems, where the whole concept of nothing gets trucked out, as "I'm talking about nothing. How do you talk about nothing if it's just nothing?" seems to be the mechanics of this dilemma. Partly, because it’s acknowledging the poetic irony of making a material thing from nothing. What’s “entertainment,” what would be the conflating pressures that essentially negate what anyone thinks entertainment is, was there ever an actual substance to be attending to when you’re being entertained? Maybe what I’m speaking to is not “nothing” but mere poetic abstraction. “You’re making something out of nothing.” as the saying goes. Or, as Robyn Schiff’s poems keep saying, “That’s exactly it.” There are so many somethings to be noticed in what people would regularly disregard as nothing. A point that speaks a particularly political truth when you consider how the concept of “property” kind of feels like a nothingness. Though it’s not. As Schiff, makes clear, there might be some other layer happening, something she attaches to literal circumstances. So if nothing were a machine, Schiff throws a bucket of sand inside, so you can hear the nothing gears grinding through their motions.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.