Reading the poems in Betsy K. Brown’s debut collection, City Nave, feels like exploring a city with train stations, deserts, and cathedrals made of words. The book is filled with descriptions of buildings, cities, and landscapes—even those poems that don’t describe the urban give architecture to abstractions and people and wildernesses through her command of form and fascination with space. She plays with a real breadth of formal devices: visual poetry (in “Basilique Du Sarré-Coeur”), traditional forms like sestinas and sonnets (in “Cursive” and “City Nave”), and two poems in which the poem’s second half comprises the exact same lines of the first half in reverse order (“Pupils” and “Bird, Gift”).
In every case, form, like the net in her poem “Volleyball,” “conducts [her] dance.” Brown’s repeating lines startle with insight while delighting with their vitality. It feels appropriate, given her ability to play with the form of a poem on the physical space of the page, that so much of City Nave is spatial. Much of the collection inhabits either the landscape of the Arizona desert, where Brown now lives, or the skylines and subways of New York. Some poems explore particular places, like Notre Dame or Phoenix. In others, abstractions like time, travel, and memory become “dorm-cells,” “sky-roads,” and “lines of track laid from mind to mind.”
Brown populates these poetic spaces with ragged and lively folk who invite her readers into a love of the poor and the small—the wayward lizard with its “pleading eyes” in “From the Basement of the Interior Castle,” the homeless and queenly guest in “Entertaining,” and the students that pop up everywhere like curious hands. If the collection is a city, Brown’s poetic vision points her readers to its most vital and lonely habitants and looks at them with eyes of love.
City Nave’s expert use of space enables Brown to prod at the nature of time, conceiving it sometimes as a kind of space. “Ode to the Original Penn Station,” speaks of the between-ness of places like train stations, saying, “A century ago, before the world / Widened, we built temples to all our / Transitions.” But the mode of transport outgrows Penn’s “Corinthian columns,” and “planes arose out / Of skulls of trains; our shrines not large enough to hold them.” Both the transitoriness of Penn Station itself, having since been destroyed, and its orientation toward transition make that space idolatrous. But the tension in Brown’s ode comes not only from the destruction of a beautiful building but the continuing, relentless race to “multiply” our “Pantheon” by creating “bigger gods with wings that graze the sun”
“Saint Monica” also creates a non-traditional space within itself, transcending time in its understanding of sainthood. The poem’s speaker is Monica, the patron saint of motherhood. She describes herself as having “planted my sons one by one in plots around the world,” contracting both time and space into a garden where a mother hopes to grow her children into saints. But the poem’s experiment with time is only the background for Monica’s humble love.
She describes herself “board[ing] lonely planes” to “grope / for my sons’ growth,” and, in praying for them, finds herself half-praying to them: “Sometimes,” she says, “It seems they’ve already become saints […] Oh, man who will be, pray for me now.” Her love and hope for her children sees the fullness of what they may be—yet, for all her hope that her sons will be saints, Monica sees very plainly her sons are not who they might be When she makes her way “out of the tie of today,” she can see the fullness of the wheat they are growing into, but as it is, “In their dorm-cells of time they sit […] looking more / Like chaff than fruit.” They are not yet resurrected, still within the confines of sin and time. Even at the end, when Monica wonders if her weeping “breaks through husks and / Nudges sprouts up” and prays “they rise,” she sees them resurrecting as “stubborn sons, squinting / With love-hate at the light.” Her humble love sees her sons as the scraggly, tousle-haired boys they are and the saints she hopes they become.
The last poem in Brown’s collection, “Buying a house on the feast of Saint Francis,” is another place of paradox. Its speakers are making perhaps the foremost purchase of their lives in the same “dorm-cell” of the calendar where St. Francis gives everything away to live in poverty. While “He sells the final book,” the homeowners “combine our books and organize / Them into genres alphabetically.” Whereas “He will wander the earth / Until death,” they “will call a piece of earth our own.” Francis will own “nothing, / Everything”; they will “own everything, nothing.”
But the poem is not a satire of homeowning—the process of buying a house mysteriously converges with the saint’s self-deprivation. While “He knows that to love a thing / It cannot be his,” they “Will know that for a thing to be ours we / Cannot love it too much.” For both Francis and the homeowners, love becomes both a possession of itself and a dispossession of all else. As Francis “knows to love a / Thing it must all be home,” the homeowners, at the very end, “will know to / Be home in a thing, it must all be love.”
In City Nave, Betsy K. Brown has built a kind of poetic city that sprawls, moves, and stays put all at once, and she has populated it with poor and vital souls. The collection is, technically and conceptually, a stirring feat—the intricate architecture in City Nave opens rooms in readers’ imaginations. Yet the pulse of the collection is the humble, vibrant inhabitants of Brown’s poetry who will live in them, and her earnest voice that will help us see them all with eyes of love.
Brendon Sylvester is a poet and writer based near Philadelphia, PA. He studied at the Torrey Honors College, where the likes of Edmund Spenser, Augustine, and the landscapes of the American National Parks influenced his imagination. His writing has appeared in Ekstasis, Touchstone, Amethyst Press’s Thin Spaces, and elsewhere.
