BOOK REVIEW:
Vortex Street by Page Hill Starzinger

Vortex Street by Page Hill Starzinger. Barrow Street. $16.95.

In Hegel’s famous formulation of the logic of history, the owl of Minerva spreads her wings only at dusk. We often hear this line misinterpreted (my college-aged self is guilty of it) as an elevated rendering of the old saw “hindsight is 20/20.” But in Page Hill Starzinger’s stunning second collection, Vortex Street, Hegel’s aphorism takes on a thornier resonance. What if self-knowledge, by necessity, arrives too late? What if our desires are always already filling holes? 

In the collection’s opening poem, “Else,” we learn quickly that Hegel’s words are not merely hypothetical for the poet but agonizingly personal. It’s too late for her to have children, and the opening two sections of the book explore the humiliations and grief of this loss: “my last two eggs simply fell out of myself, tumbling,” she writes. Has she squandered what she’s been given? And without children, how will she be remembered?  These questions haunt Starzinger throughout the book, but as she addresses them, we witness her startling array of philosophical and poetic powers. She is a poet so attuned to sound and so precise in her language’s associative capacity that the experience of reading her is akin to reading a thriller. The unexpectedness of her images, the way they bleed into each other and startle us, left me tingling. While some of her language requires a dictionary at hand to appreciate, the effort is well worth it. Each re-reading rewards a new unveiling of meaning. And this layering is precisely part of Starzinger’s method. 

The first line of “Else” makes a demand of its readers—to “go back to the beginning of the beginning and the darkness filled with 1,000,000 eggs.” In opening this way, the poet places us on a timeline, one impossible to imagine. The word “Else” works twin adverbial purposes, to suggest something more, something beyond, but it also can be used as a hypothetical. Starzinger is deeply concerned with finding alternative interpretations of the self, of unraveling and re-braiding the body and mind. 

In “Specula,” one of the collection’s best, the title itself immediately exposes a tension between the observer and the observed, doctor and the patient, body and the self. Specula, the medical instrument, is also the Latin word for mirror. But in the opening lines of the poem, as the man (explicitly not a doctor) presses the sonogram over the poet’s ovaries, the mirror plays a trick – the specula offers information mediated only through him; it’s a mirror that bars the subject from seeing herself. The man tells her the ovary is “completely shut down.” And the poet demands a different form of knowledge: 

The sonogram, the specula, and the man, can answer none of these questions, of course. Each line requests a different channel of sensory inquiry; her questions pile up. Her project is epistemological, and Starzinger is always zooming in and out, her observations granular – of her body, flowers, fish roe, words themselves. Most striking in “Specula” are the poet’s radical shifts in tone, signaling new frames of perception. A voice cratered by loss, “This is where all my children would have sprung,” abruptly becomes meticulous, dutiful, the voice of a lexicographer: “alea, meaning dice/ as in aleatoric music: Mozart.” We’re confronted with these strange etymologies throughout the collection, each probing of a word’s history reassess the image held in front of us. In this case, the meaning of alea, the Latin word for dice, transforms the image of the ovary into a game of chance, each dot, each egg, a probability. The purpose of such etymological excavations, and there are many throughout the collection (noon, pileus, entrayage, asperitas, Nevron, flake, Norwich, the list goes on.) is the method by which Starzinger scours the flaws in our language, like the flaws in our bodies, to arrive at a clearer, more honest, image of the self. “I am full of faults,” she writes. Yet “Fun/ fact: A fault under the Himalayan peaks/ pushes them up by a centimeter each year.” As in the aleatoric music of the dice, Starzinger’s pun wants us to see faults neither as randomness or fate, but as sequence of notes – probability as song and energy. She also disarms us with her paranomasia (puns appear again and again), the casualness of “Fun Fact.” Like James Merrill or Elizabeth Bishop, Starzinger expands and contracts her frames of perception – through competing tones – to expose the rifts in her self-perception, to make music of this dissonance. “Did you know the earth hums?” She asks.

Such music and movement are hallmarks of Starzinger’s style, whose meter and lineation, like the geological and biological metaphors she returns to, expand and contract in sudden, unexpected jolts, like sharp, painful intakes of breath. Her poems swing from order to disorder, clauses stack, shift, and break but other times end in symmetry, like the lines “magnificent glands/ corrugated, grooved/ and furrowed,” each line placed in a perfectly mirrored trimeter, the exquisitely stretched mono-syllabic words “glands” and “grooved” acting as small moments of continuity.  

In the poem “Vocal Balance,” which appears in the fourth section of the collection, Starzinger turns the mirror upon her parents, shifting the poet’s frames of perception toward her own origins.

What’s striking about these lines is how each participial phrase lacks a subject; the clauses stack up on each other, like the tectonic plates in “Specula,” yet they find nothing to modify. The absence of an agent suggests that the braiding and unwinding of cellular strands possesses no physical continuity – only a handful of notes, like the music of Starzinger’s shifting earth (it’s no coincidence this poem is titled “Vocal Balance.”) As soon as the poet’s voice reaches its emotional peak, it refocuses, shifts into a more scholarly, academic gear. This pattern of genealogical and etymological tunneling also connects our bodies to lineages older than our parents and our children’s children. The word “Ensorcelling,” that strange encounter in this stanza, means enchant; it is also the origin of sorcerer. The enchantment of such a word is to expose the striations of time that exist within it, just as all words contain old engravings of meaning. Words are fossils, Starzinger suggests, meant to be excavated, their histories studied. It becomes clear why Starzinger’s etymological rabbit holes are so exciting – she’s extending the physical self beyond its veins, asking us to reposition the timeline of the self, to place our bones and language within a deeper sense of history.  

Starzinger’s philosophical claims, though, are not meant to offer consolation. These questions plumb some of the collection’s deepest anxieties, anxieties that feel more resonant today, especially as more and more of us question the reasons for having children.

In the collection’s most heartbreaking poem, “About a House,” Starzinger reflects on her parents’ deteriorating health, her mother’s dementia. In one section, the verse suddenly turns to prose as she encounters a vintage ladder-back chair her father had built for her future children. The reflection becomes almost too painful to bear, and we can see the poet’s mind resorting to what it does in pain: classifying, parsing, tracing, analyzing, scouring the origins of a word. It does in pain: classifying, parsing, tracing, analyzing, scouring the origins of a word.

Something breaks in the poet’s mind in this paragraph; perhaps this is why it can’t be written in verse, or perhaps the etymological digging has reached its limit. The causal chains all break. “I would have the child because I would have the chair. The chair was the child.” Noon is a figure that links the breaking of time to the breaking of the self from its desires. It’s too late, Noon says.  

In reading “About a House,” the paradox at the heart of the collection’s title became clear to me. Vortex Street points to the impossible circularity of caregiving for one’s parent and the myth of children prolonging one’s existence, the myth of linearity, of immortality, of locating the self in anything but stories and sound:

This is a book about mourning. Yet in grief, Starzinger achieves a remarkable feat: she manages to thrill us – with the exuberance of her language, her associative playfulness, her erudition. Humor, too, inserts itself and keeps us going. Send me the bonbons, they’ll get me through/ to the end. It is this balancing of tones – of both pain and enchantment – that only a poet with Starzinger’s powers could balance. In the collection’s eponymous poem, she finds a way to capture so much of her philosophical project in only a few lines:

Alex Burchfield is a writer from western Montana. His fiction has appeared in West Branch magazine, and he is currently at work on a novel.