Aquifer by Ellen Sander
April 21, 2022 - Claire Millikin is a poet who teaches art history at various colleges. For her Read & Loved selection she highlights the chapbook Aquifer by Maine poet Ellen Sander. She has this to say about the work:
“Aquifer, poems evoked on water, is a chapbook that feels pure; it isn't "clean" in the staid traditional sense but rather through honesty, and startling accuracy of conjoined details, the poems are like looking at a familiar room in strong natural light and realizing you never really saw it until now. The poems are especially attuned to time, to the strangeness of time that we move through. Couplets like one (from the poem "Licht" the German word for Light), "It takes two nights / to hold a day in place," and one (from the poem "Cappuccino with Amelia"), "It's been 9.44 for 3 hours / I sit here grounded in so-called time," call out the chronic dissonances between our daily lives in petro-capitalism and the continued, beautiful, inescapable force of the natural world — water, time, birds, trees, mortality. The collection's final line sounds a fine, clear vesperal note: "winter / coat in lap / I / thread in hand / mending." This premise of mending weaves through these clear-sighted poems that never falsify the hardness of industrial-capitalist harms. Just like the clocks they so often evoke, these clepsydral works keep immaculate, steady pulse.”
From Painting by the Sea
In some paintings there is a boat
as if to say there is always
some way to another
sadness, better sorrows, different regrets
The boat leaves at sunset
and we could be on it