“SOUNDS BEYOND LOVE”: ON JILL OSIER’S THE SOLACE IS NOT THE LULLABY

Yale University Press, 2020. 80 pages. $45.00.

Winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets, Jill Osier’s first collection, The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, tackles what it is to be within narrative—and the strangeness of that being. Osier slips into the quiet between language, into the unnamed “it” that shrouds us like a cloak— into the disjecta membra, “scattered fragments,” that remains of a life. Carl Philips, judge of the prize, writes that Osier’s eye for the fragment raises “a question [that] concerns epistemology.” For Philips, Osier’s theory of knowing is the inherently paradoxical: that the attention to the unnamed is the closest we may dive at knowing. When examining the fragments with this epistemic framework in place, we are taught by Osier to examine these pieces as artifacts gesturing toward a greater state of being—and a solace we may find in its mystery. 

Jill Osier’s most straightforward—if we may call it such—statement on narrative strangeness would be her aptly titled “Story”: 

It might have happened 

at the river, petting the wild swan, 

the pure-breasted, black-eyed silent one 

drawing us down in our dresses and suits 

through branches and mud to banks 

wet and hidden. 

“Story,” here, begs the question of “it”—what is It? The mind jumps to the book’s title itself, The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, where we are similarly faced with the question: in what, then, do we take solace? For “Story,” we are led to Osier’s philosophy of storytelling: that narrative, within the human experience, can never be given a satisfying beginning or end, or even often a “what” or a “why.” The fragments of narrative, like the recovered shards of ancient pottery, can only offer a piece of the story, and we are often left to decipher the disjecta membra that passes into our life as the spectator and the subject. 

The question of how one may assemble solace from the disjointed pieces is the only gesture made toward an answer by Osier. In the title poem, “The Solace Is Not the Lullaby But That Anything Can Be a Lullaby,” she opens: 

When the German shopkeeper died, they said, Go back 

to what you know. So there was math. There was standing 

at the stove stirring soup until my father came home. 

In keeping with the elusive quality of “Story,” Osier does not provide many explanations: what is the speaker’s relation to the shopkeeper? Who is they? How old is the speaker? Etcetera. Osier does provide some kind of continuity: she goes on to write that there was “an untruth” and “authorities found it curled asleep / outside his house.” It. It can be Anything? And Anything can be a Lullaby—and we are to take heart in Solace, which is not truly elusive in quality, but all encompassing? Are we also to say that the “untruth” is such, because it is a refusal that in solace itself we may find peace? Osier suggests such a syllogistic trail. But Osier asks us to abandon our questions to a scenery of silence, where her “it” transforms into “a new quiet / they had to pick up and carry away.”

The Solace Is Not the Lullaby is a book that defines knowledge in questions, as those raised in “Story” and “The Solace Is Not the Lullaby…” and sifts through the pieces of everyday “town” life. The scattered fragments are the remnants of this culture—Osier is concerned with “the light / as we all sat down to supper” and “swimming / in a small-town river.” The ecstatically ordinary. The cultural assembly, in the collection, is an attempt to recover the instances of lullaby—or, at least, that which soothes us into being. In “Some Roads in Iowa,” Osier observes: 

We are never loving what we think we are. Never 

simply. The first thing we loved 

we don’t even remember: a corner 

of fabric, some handle. 

For her, there is a love in attention, though our ability to name and know where we place our gaze is at continuous fault. Our everyday attempts at apprehension are flawed, but as “anything can be a lullaby,” we are directed to take comfort in our failure as seers. Osier’s epistemology does require us, however, to continue seeking knowledge within these fragments—an action that, even when the yield is empty, leaves one within a kind of peace. She writes in “Shell Rock Song”: 

Again they stood motionless, 

yet they were more still. 

I stayed adoring them, 

over an hour in the cold, 

waiting, I think, 

for them to love me. 

The Solace Is Not the Lullaby is seemingly sparse in its form, but expansive in its logic and hefty in its request: to be. Osier’s straightforward declarations offer a sympathy with the task of knowing, in how “a clear sunlit day is hard / in the way it is full with itself, / not waiting for you.” Unlike many contemporary poets who seek to provide resolution within their collection (especially under the pressures of releasing a “successful” first book), Jill Osier does not fear the outcome of her interrogations. 

To be in the world is the most instinctive and simple act we complete every day, though it is, paradoxically, impossible to master. To live among the quiet slips of the unknown, the people in town, the oncoming storm, we must not withdraw our attention from these “[s]ounds beyond love, sounds beyond love.” 

“Tonight,” Osier writes in “Mars”: “bodies will shine / with old light. Some will never / be this close again.”