Reviewed by Kathleen Bednarek
As If Scattered
by Holaday Mason
Giant Claw Press
October 2024, 110 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8990014923
As If Scattered starts out with the opening admonition from a Scottish proverb: “Be sure to live your life, because you’re a long time dead.” which sets a tone of existential urgency ushering in the initial poems.
In the first part of the book we enter with, “Bedtime Stories,” where we pick up on the format of the collection, as shorter poems exchange words with longer works in a back and forth communication of core themes. Mason quickly shifts into an influx of embodied imagery and sensuous detail; absorbing love poems, lush and erotic, are further enlivened, countered by a more objective perspective as landscapes of the natural world magnify the intimacy of Mason’s poems. The meditative poetic interchange using briefer lines, airy lineation and informal erasure drew me in through breath and space, encouraging a contemplative atmosphere. Mason holds to this juxtaposition of forms throughout the text and I found the interrelationship of the majority of poems was effective without devolving into mere device or gimmick.
Besides being a poet, Mason tends to a career as a photographer and I noted how that part of her creative life has influenced her poetic lens–as her dedication and adept care of images is evident.
For instance, in a poem, “God” the atmosphere expands and rather than atomizing, crashes, conquering a realm of limitations:
The coastal mists
from the underworld
fling themselvesover the rooftops.
It’s this authority to subtlety and activated imagery that intrigued me with the collection.
Where the collection was impressive in detail, I found some aspects of its formatting slightly distracting. Throughout the book there are empty pages to allow for spacing, but I puzzled at times with the sequence of small graphics, of what appeared to be strands or a jumble of lines. I felt myself wanting these pages to just be, wishing that Mason would have been more trusting and allowing of the open page.
As If Scattered includes epigraphs from Holly Prado, an L.A. poet, fiction writer and champion of the Southern California literary scene who passed away in 2019. Prado was founder of Cahuenga Press and a contemporary of Mason’s. My knowledge of Prado’s affiliation with the L.A. poetry scene and her relatively recent passing added another layer of temporality and intimacy to the work. It is Prado’s words interlaid with Mason’s that give As If Scattered a spectre of guidance, of a mentor watching over the process of love, grief and words as witness to the natural world. A section of poems “He Carries Me Like A Bouquet of Flowers” fluidly shifts the tone and perspective through the central part of the text. Through poems like “Chimes,” we join Mason as she captures ordinary life wrapping images around the reader, intertwining nature and the senses through lines evoking summer, golden light, and waves before again returning to the body as momentary:
We are always almost old until we are,
in our personal, imperfect homes of skin. (“Ancient as Always”)
In “Extinction,” the third and final section of the book, Mason confronts the devastating impact of wildfires, the pandemic, speaking from a state of dis-ease.
In “COVID Christmas Card” Mason writes:
Last night I had blooms
then petals, lungs full
of peonies flying loose lifted me
off the mattress in bits
of collage paper torn from
newspaper clippings, headlines,
the doctor named “never,” dark
banks of thunder in my ribs.
I read these increasingly tragic lines as wildfires swept through large swaths of Los Angeles County raining ash and displacing thousands, blazes subsequently erasing entire neighborhoods. Mason’s poems doubled and mirrored my awareness of the natural disaster, creating a hyper relevance to the work.
For instance in “Talking to Ashes” we encounter a poem directly speaking to a landscape clinging for survival:
Under a tree of dreamcatchers,
the drought cracks oaks in Topanga—
Oregon suffocates in smoke,
hydrangeas and birches burn.
As If Scattered is a reflective book covering strong existential themes of love, death, nature and survival. Mason aims her visionary powers at a depth of conflict and surfaces with a powerfully imagistic collection. Mason’s poetry cohesively gathers varying form lengths and erasures making for an interesting topography to the book.
Ultimately, As If Scattered is a collection I would return to for its atmosphere and timeless themes. There are vivid moments of beauty and contemplation in Mason’s collection, that I considered As If Scattered, (finite) time well spent.