Two Poets to Watch

Two Poets to Watch A review of work by Leigh Anne Couch and Sandra Beasley

“Things fall apart,” Yeats warned early in the tumultuous twentieth century, “the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / . . . and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” In the realm of the personal, a similar instability and sense of violated innocence permeate these first collections by Leigh Anne Couch and Sandra Beasley. Even, perhaps especially, narratives of family and various sorts of love find expression in imagery of explosion, violence, disappearance, and toxicity.

A woman in another poem is described in succession as “a walk at midnight when the train’s long gone” and “a smokestack lunging at three a.m. moonlight.” “Run your hand along the vessel / of her,” Couch encourages. “Go ahead, she’ll like it.” Here, as throughout Houses Fly Away , these shifts of identity and matter seem less like useful tropes for emotional upheaval than literal shape-shifting. Like mythic enchanters, the self and the world become something else the moment Couch tries to grasp them.