A few years ago, I reviewed Eleonore Schönmaier’s 2021 collection Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete. The book was tender, with clear language and the ability to evoke empathy as it guided the reader along the poet’s trail of grief. It set my expectations high for her newest collection.
Rush of Wingspan comprises seven sections: Northern Bush; Atlantic Coastal Forest; North Sea City Forest; Wings; Geometries of Light; Night Alignments; and Entanglements. Three titles are geographical, three, I’m guessing, allegorical, and the final one hints at its engagement with humans and our messy ways.
The poems in the first section are built around childhood and teenage memories, often eerily similar to my own experiences delivering newspapers by foot and bike or saving my wages to spend on books and Christmas gifts for my family. There’s a bit of magic in “Weasels,” a poem in which weasels morph into angels and help the ten-year-old speaker complete a long trail walk. But as every girl and woman knows, the men leer at our young bodies as we move out into the working world. Schönmaier plants trees, cleans, is a health aide, a census taker. (I did most of those too. And endured the leers.)
In “Penelope,” she describes how, near the end of her teens, words began to entrance her. “… On many // days I study on the shore / and wait for all the words / in all their sounds and songs // to sail home to me. This / takes years and some / bright sails as they billow // in the wind / I only ever hear / from a great distance” (pp. 29–30). For me, it was music that was first most enticing, then words; for this poet, the reverse.
In the next two sections—Atlantic Coastal Forest and North Sea City Forest—the speaker lives with a lover and then marries. By page 56 and the poem “Burning,” twenty years have passed. She asks, “Do our / lives always become more / than we imagined?” (p. 57), to which I would reply, no, not always. Sometimes they shape up to be less—but less good or bad, as the poet illustrates in the next poem, “Floats”: “where we share / the best / and embrace // the worst, but / where the best floats / to the surface” (pp. 58). She’s an optimist—or perhaps just honestly describing a relationship that works.
“Trains Still Arrive” is one of the strongest poems in the book, and one of the best poems about marriage that I’ve read: “on the same / schedule // forty years later. / Laughing // I’m holding cherry / blossoms // though neither of / us // arrives or departs / today” (p. 70).
The narrator’s trajectory brings her to music in her forties, learning first to play and then write it—the section title, Wings, fits the theme well, with its evocation of birds, songs, and music. In “Morning” (p. 87) “Light in its fullness // both fades and brightens / the musical colours … Each note / scales its own height” and in “Night” (p. 89), “Slowly the stars begin / their designs as we worry / at the tapestry of our // thoughts: this light / that travels through / our infinity of years.” Here is displayed the sensitive language I have come to expect from this poet. And, cleverly, the words ‘light’ and ‘night’ foreshadow the next two sections’ titles: Geometries of Light and Night Alignments.
It’s difficult for me to encapsulate the poems in Geometries of Light. Some tackle grief; others are elegies. “Clarity” (p. 111) begins “The purple and yellow croci / forcing their way out // of the ground are undelivered / messages from the dead.” (I choose to see them as delivered.)
In Night Alignments, a strong, Covid-themed poem called “Blur” sees an old woman defying her curfew and going out anyway; she’s blind and seeking the scent of flowers. The kicker comes when she tells an interlocutor she’s one hundred and four years old. She’s waved on her way—her possible proximity to death taken as an acceptable excuse for indulging.
This section also contains “Model Collapse,” a particularly fun poem in which Schönmaier compares the way AI trains on human ideas with the over-breeding of golden retrievers, until “the end result / will be images not of // unique dogs, humans / or ideas but self-generated / golden blobs” (p. 130). (Golden retrievers suffer from a much higher incidence of many health problems, including cancer and joint issues.)
In the final section of the book, Entanglements, Schönmaier revisits both her stark early childhood and much richer later life, fulfilled by her lover, music, art, and books. The last poem, “Open Gates,” is strong and amusing. Hungry after a long bike ride to the bakery, she writes teasingly, “Ah, I ate your favourite / pear and chocolate tart out there // under the unfurling sky … / It tasted almost // as if you were right / there beside me / as if we were sharing” (p. 157). Here a portrait of a happy marriage emerges.
The book’s title appears in “When Wings Open Doors” (p.77). A buzzard “claws // and clutches the vole / among the leaves, then swivels / its gaze briefly at me before // flying off / in a rush / of wingspan.” In a separate incident within the same poem, she frees a flicker that has flown down her chimney and can be heard tapping in the woodstove. Two birds, both survivalists in the face of humanity. What else can one do but survive? And even, sometimes, thrive.