Previous Issue: Spring/Summer 2010

Measuring the Dark by Kate Gleason  
Zone 3 Press, 2009 $14.00

Review by Elizabeth McDonnell

Kate Gleason’s Measuring the Dark is a collection of layers. Narratives unfold, many deeply intimate, inside a larger landscape that refutes control. Scenes between lovers and family are matched against war, death, the 1950’s, the universe. Even words themselves "lie / inside other words / like Chinese boxes" ("Words"), drawing us into a world where life is constantly on the brink of inescapable change: soviet missiles become a threat, divorce takes shape, time nudges us closer in the direction of death. Gleason’s poems consistently shift through this network of failure, resolution, and loss, as reflected in “Reading in My Mother’s Hospital Room”: 

…it’s almost impossible not to picture,
seeing the sponge being moved so smoothly
and the water rolling off
my mother’s shoulders, which each day
are becoming a little more curved. 

It’s time, isn’t it, not gravity, that bends us
back to the earth?

 At her best, Gleason’s language is sharp, weighted, subtly humorous. Her images are often unexpected and beautifully constructed, a V of wild geese transforming to "a drawn bow whose arrow is song" ("Wild Geese"), or the trunks of trees wrapped with tape resembling "the delicate ankles of race horses ("Morning Walk on My Fiftieth Birthday"). Beyond the image, rhythm too plays a prominent role in Measuring the Dark. "After the Foreclosure" provides the reader with a naturally felt, quick-paced account of a life now ended, of the wealth of memories soon to be replaced as a late grandfather’s house is resold. As the narrator recounts difficulty in anticipating another family in the house, so to can the reader feel the careful unwinding of emotion down the page, that attachment which remained even "after the same but different fish / kissed open the seam of the lake, after the same / but different sun sent down its spokes into the deep, / and the towels of the new swimmers sprung / like bumper crops on the beach."

Connection and separation are ultimately key components of this collection and nothing, from a marriage to the particulate matter of our bodies, remains solid enough to completely avoid transformation. Even children are not spared as both the threat and promise of adulthood draws them quickly into a foreign world of sex and makeup, away from "dirt and dares / and the delicious stretch of your growing / abilities, the animal joy of the body / in motion ("Girl, Circa 1970").

To read Measuring the Dark is to enter the realm of experience and memory and to consider and reconsider those complexities. "The whole cloth / we thought our bodies were cut from / begins to undo," Gleason writes in "What Desire is For," a brief account of both danger and consequence. She writes:

 Your face the face I imagine
Icarus wore when he flew where he wanted,
despite being warned.