Reviewed by Karen Pierce Gonzalez
In Silver Majesty
by Donna Faulkner
erbacce-press
2024, ISBN : 978 -1-912455-48-5
The weft and weave of In Silver Majesty by Donna Faulker spins such finely woven elements into a tapestry that mysteriously has no beginning or end. And yet, still fulfills its promise to show us the sterling richness of what it means to be alive.
At any juncture in the arc of this collection, Faulkner makes us keenly aware that all locations of time and space are linked. Life has an inescapable kinship with death one cannot reason with. To find our way in that endless chain, we must be willing, as she suggests in the opening poem, to become uncomfortable with where we may find ourselves at any given moment.
Out of place
I am a scarecrow
dropping straw on the catwalk,
a spiderweb
hung from the moon
I am odd
The poet’s observations and revelations pour into our senses as deep-dives into pools of feeling that can stagnate or liberate the living, the unlived, and those long gone.
From a Dickensian Miss Havisham world, This is what it has come to:
bitter
with dust.
Cobwebs are commandeering
I pretend
not to care.
to a remembering of layered history Rekindling Ashes:
The Iceni burned
London’
to the ground,
they danced
amongst
scorched cinders.
Somewhere
in the wasteland
the wind lassos.
And then onto a keen awareness of the now in Escaping Suburbia:
There’s
a housefly
dazed,
slow flying
tracing circles
in it ’s maddening
Skeletons, dusty books and stale bodies exist seamlessly alongside a newborn swimming in safe waters, and the bending of dandelions that don’t break. All imprinted firmly in Faulkner’s words, they peel back the cover on her own aches and elations about this experience of being human.
And the poetry unapologetically reveals a fascination with what death might leave behind.
If the world ends
If all the people
vanished
and I found myself alone.
I’d lose myself
in old museums
touch everything forbidden,
rummage through restricted zones
and feast upon the secrets.
Faulkner also explores her own mortality in “The Deadlands”:
Not a solitary blackbird
on a broken branch.
No budding leaves to lament
nor the whip of wailing breath.
I drink the dread
that wallows
in the afterglow.
And I must pass alone
through the labyrinth.
Hollow as I am.
This collection is a departure from her earlier, The Oracle of Birds, a hybrid of prose and poetry that explores lessons learned while driving the open-roads of life on a motorcycle, In Silver Majesty is a different kind of journey; one that masterfully blends haunting reverie and clear-eyed accounting with surreal ribbons of recall that benchmark a basic desire to feel, sometimes again and again, the textured ways others’ lives have touched ours. It also serves to remind us that we are in the midst of all we have loved and will love, All of it dangling on strings of moonlight that could forge a way forward into the unknown.
About the reviewer: Karen Pierce Gonzalez is an award-winning Northern California writer and artist. Her chapbooks include Coyote in the Basket of my Ribs (Kelsay Books), Down River with Li Po (Black Cat Poetry Press). More than 65 of her art images have been published; seven of them as cover art. She is also the editor of Ekphrastic Folk Art (FolkHeart Press).