New Titles in Poetry

Veil and Burn: Poems
Author: Laurie Clements Lambeth
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Cloth $40.00 (79 p.)
ISBN-13: 9780252032769
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Veil and Burn is Laurie Clements Lambeth's first book of poetry. These short, lyric pieces engage the mind, the spirit, the senses, and the heart, as the reader comes to understand that the narrator of these poems is in a struggle with a debilitating disease. Lambeth uses this material not as an end in itself, but rather as a metaphor to approach the human dilemma--not limited to those with diagnosed conditions--of our awareness of our mortality. Still, as a metaphor, illness is thoroughly worked. Lambeth's narrator terrifies us by making it so easy to slip inside her skin and try on the burden of her body. How this feels is laid out in simple lines with exquisite images, such as in "Symptoms" where the physical restrictions new to the body are compared with, "…girdle/ my grandmother wore, tight-laced corset/ worn by her mother in Wales, but it seldom slips/ from my ribcage…."

The serious major subject and its clear-eyed treatment do not take over the collection, in which Lambeth's quirky humor also figures, especially in her references to films and film mechanics, one of which supplies the title of the work. Additionally, against the awareness of disease and limits, the reader learns about the life interrupted, a Western life, lived outdoors with horses and rough-handed work. Poems that focus on this former experience take us into places that feel true, though we may not have witnessed the birth of a foal, or spent time at a wild horse sanctuary. The vigor of these images ("Unruly horse, I hope you gave them hell…"), placed alongside or inside the darker poems, wrench the reader with the contrast. It is by examining contrasts throughout her work that Lambeth is able to bring about an integration of the most important aspects of life, including its end, an integration defiant and hopeful, and rooted in the making of art. Nowhere is this better shown than in the amazing poem dedicated to Georgia O'Keefe, "Large Loop Excision of the Temporal Zone", where the alpha and the omega share the same image.