For reading this book, it might first be useful to imagine the order on one of those tapestries you might see at a museum. They should be the tapestries that evoke a broad landscape, a city, a “nature scene” that is more about animals threading their bodes among verdant forest-ish figures. It’s an order order that I don’t always do an adequate job reading enough into. Like I’m not a good viewer of tapestries, because I wish I could be more conscious of all the geometries and visual tropes and order. I wish I could grasp the ultimate order of a tapestry, but I’m often thinking about details as decorative touches. Which they are. But there is something more than just decoration happening.
However deficient I am with viewing that kind of art, I read Machado like her poems are assembling a tapestry. Or they’re enacting a tapestry. Or they performing in language how a tapestry seems to exist in a static state on a wall, knowing poems aren’t static. They exist over a time. Even if their time is felt like an aspic congealing on a plate. Think, for instance, how in the book’s opening section a tree line establishes the texture and boundary line of a city. In a subsequent section, crowded wares evoke an emporium. And in still another section (”or”) the meaningfulness of adjacency. Where one idea, or one object, or one experience is placed beside something, there is something to be understood from that. Like if there were pages taken out of an archive (a gesture Machado does in one of the book’s sections), and some text were deleted, there would be the fact that what are now framed as “fragments” appear to be separate from one another (because of what the poet had deleted), but they must be related to one another. Because they are part of the same document. It’s just a few lines of intervening text that have been taken out.
And it’s like OMG that could be what a tapestry is! Or maybe every emporium visit could be read or interpreted or mimetically inscribed as a tapestry. Or what if experience, which poems are so accustomed to relating, could be stuffed into a tapestry’s mold, like what I see in “Meadow Interregnum.” Yes, I’m doing the wrong thing for someone reviewing a book. I’m letting my enthusiasm for this one reading be the reading. But what I hope someone reading this would see is Machado playing with stasis and the unavoidable temporality of language. And you could read every instance of “tapestry” as “descriptive observation.” One where the poet exaggeratedly sees the world around her. And makes a language to accommodate that seeing.
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.