Reviewed by Cynie Cory
Blue Physics
by Mary Lou Buschi
Lily Poetry Review
February 2024, 78 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1957755380
The framework of Mary Lou Buschi’s most recent collection of poetry, Blue Physics, is structured to convey the action of the speaker’s mind that repeatedly attempts, and fails, to remember a traumatic event. Bushi employs the circuitous structure to the book which underscores the overarching theme of loss, specifically the trauma experience. The work is performative: the reader participates in the speaker’s ongoing journey to remember the trauma. Yet traumatic memories cannot be recalled because overwhelming stress disrupts how the brain decodes information. (Cleveland Clinic). This disorganization is illustrated in Buschi‘s use of time, form, and syntax. An example of this is the placement of “The Ice Storm” which headlines the opening section of Blue Physics and is buried sequentially by the two potent epigraphs. In this way, structure ruptures time. This treatment of time is repeatedly employed as one of the formal aspects in the poems of Blue Physics.
The collection’s “final” poem, “April is the Cruelest Month,” circles back to before the book begins. This deliberate movement returns the reader to the first of two epigraphs: “Blue”, a poem penned by the author [which leads us to revisit the next epigraph: a copy of a handwritten letter from John to Lucy dated 6/11/77 which sets (and resets) themes of loss and provides context for the reader. John’s name threads throughout the collection. He writes “…I truly believe we became close friends in Nov-Jan and I hope the same still exists. If this is true, please call me at…” His closing salutation is “Love.” ]
“Blue” is instrumental in preparing the reader for the mystery within many of the poems in the collection, and for the complicated elegance of the poems themselves. Mary Lou Buschi is the real thing, and we are convinced as early as the epigraph, “Blue”. Buschi is a master of the poetic line. Each line has its own integrity, and it must be so. Buschi works with emotional subject matter that refuses sentimentality. Her work is invested in the precision of this emotionality better kept distanced from the speaker. She achieves remarkable authority of voice and tension through her chiseled craft and detailed attention to language.
Blue
The way light bends—
Blood through skin
A circle within
a lake—
How it moves.
“Blue” is not static. Its first line is elegant, an equation. It describes the blue of the title, “in the way light bends—” with authority. The diction is clear, quiet. The poet has immaculate control over the speed of the action of “bending”. It is an action that must be imagined by the reader. The action of imagining the action of Blue is suspended using both abstraction and the M dash as the end stop. There is further slowing, using double spacing which increases the depth and length of white space and is further emphasized through a deep indentation of the second line, “Blood through skin”: The explanation of Blue bending. This is the beginning of a brilliant complication which paradoxically gives the reader clarity through the image of “Blood through the skin”. It is atypical for a poem to begin and move with an abstraction, as does Rene Char, and build the movement through the poem with more abstraction. “Blue” is deliberately slow. It moves at the speed of blood through skin, which complicates the title as color, which we initially see as light bending –.
Blue is now Red – (through skin) and in a sense we must read (past tense “red” as a play on words) the skin as another movement of color – “skin” may falsely ground the reader because it is a noun that is tangible. Yet the line, “Blood through skin,” has its own integrity and its indentation emphasizes the image that end jambs. Our perspective, our sight, our senses are fooled – This is not stasis, nor is the poem necessarily at this point, about blood through skin – Yet we come to the capitalization of the next line “A circle within” which results in an ambiguity. This is a continuation of the line above; however, the end rhymes “skin” and “within” pull focus on the two lines, which are meant to be read closely as a continuation of the bending blue light, the blood through skin. We see the circle within which becomes “a lake”. The use of an M dash holds the reader to the image of the lake for an increased period. This noun grounds the reader and the poem. It is the precise place the entire manuscript circles around.
This poem, as epigraph mind you, does so much work in only five brief lines.
“The lake” brings us back to blue – The most concrete moment in the poem – The reader is finally rewarded by the difficult work the poem demands of us: from the penultimate movement of the poem where the punctuation suspends us in time to the left margin where our eye must travel inward to “How it moves.”
The poem begins with a movement and continues moving by bending to a circle in a lake –to a final understanding the way blue moves.
We could say the poem moves full circle but that would be to misunderstand “How it moves.” The final line is a full thought with a full end stop. It correlates to “Blood through skin” through its shared indentation and capitalization of the first word.
Blue moves precisely the way the poet indicates. Color is perception and is also determined through wavelengths and frequency. Color is complicated. There is an aspect of color that is purely physical and objective. Yet the question of light and color begins to become metaphysical. Color is not a property of light. Frequency is a property of light. (Newton) The Title of the work, “Blue Physics”, is oddly irrational. Or intentional. The author is not to be underestimated. She knows that color goes beyond physics into the realm of metaphysics, what is known as quale (pl. qualia), also sound. (Locke)
Each poem in Blue Physics is exact. The poet is hyper aware of time without telegraphing this to her reader. Her themes are loss, death and what happens in between: childhood, innocence, the loss of innocence through sexual experience, and traumatic experience. The sequencing of the poems and the sections indicate a sharpening of time, an acuteness that the poet surrenders to because, well, she lives in time. Therefore, the poems move in time. They slow. They stop. The future is intercepted by the present and the past. The poet works in couplets. Couplets help organize time. They slow narration. They slow time. The poet tightly controls the line. She uses white space to slow, to listen, to reflect, to breathe. She uses long lines without stanzas. She breaks open poems like eggs and exposes the messy innerness of sexuality and experience. She writes poems in justified lines, she writes in forms, for one the Abcederian, she incorporates redaction.
Buschi’s experimentation with form is not born of restlessness it is an interrogation of the heart of truth, experience, — it is born of content. The speaker’s identity is expressed in her journey through time as she matures through the grief of natural disasters, and the deaths of her mother and father.
The shape of the speaker’s journey is linear with episodes that interrupt this. The even lines of the couplets define time as organized while tricking the reader into perceiving the speaker’s world is conventional and relatable. The stories are spiked with the precision of language and deliberate rhythms that control the line. The result often performs the elasticity of time. While time is suspended, it also suspends the reader in time. The poet implements end stops or repeated expectant white space. In doing so, she creates the illusion of certainty and stability that may contrast the content and paradoxically destabilize the reader.
There are prose poems, narratives that take the shape of a block. They carry silence in the press of words into a tension that is meant not to be opened, much like a locked door or a wall. Bricks do not give. For instance, “Tangerine” is a line-justified prose poem. This is a performance where the speaker attempts to hide the imperfections of the emotional content. The poet is clever by half. The poem is loaded with information that is quite literally boxed in and hermetic.
We run past the smashed and jagged gravestones. Pebbled tar sticking
to our bare feet. We call it conditioning; making the soles of our feet
so tough we can walk on any surface without shoes. Laying out on the
hood of my father’s car, memorizing the lyrics to Tangerine. Measuring
a summer day:
The energy of these poems brings the reader through subjective experience. However, this collection offers more than transformational life experience. Ironically, the sequencing of the poems tends to be chronological: Girlhood, catholic school experience, sexual encounters, family, death of father and mother, and concludes with a mature speaker. These are themes we often see laid out neatly in poetry collections of “Innocence into Experience.” (This is not lost on this poet; her poem “I Want” is dedicated to William Blake.)
These poems are events, familial and sexual, all that determines the psychology of the speaker through time. The poems are called forth and sculpted from a cleaved heart. They are an achievement of the belief in the transformative experience. The speaker repeatedly demonstrates her ability to reenter the self from this cleaved heart while she interrogates loss and grief through the complicated overlay of emotional density.
The fact that Buschi’s work begins before it begins (like a ski racer poised at the starting gate at the top of the course, ski poles positioned outward before she shifts the weight of her body backward and forward; She propels herself out of the starting gate into a race that requires mental and physical agility, balance, speed, and timing. It is a race against the elements and obstacles) is essential to understanding the psyche of this speaker and the trajectory of the work itself. This poet controls the velocity of her content, and like a ski racer sees “two gates ahead” to navigate the emotional pin turns and flushes, to avoid ice ruts, to maneuver the body through a labyrinth of obstacles with speed and finesse without undermining the tenor of her voice or eroding the emotional tenacity of her expressed experience. For any poet, the creation of a poem is daunting. The form must marry its content. The variables to consider are innumerable. This poet is a master of sight, of listening. Buschi never throws a line away, she never “wipes out” on the course. Buschi is painstakingly precise in her use of language and punctuation. This is a poet whose writes in lines. She clearly controls the speed of her lines through enjambments and end stops, including internal punctuation.
The concreteness of the poetic form and its materiality as language produces what we as readers and poets generally agree on as conventions of poetry. This poet turns convention on its head, first with the epitaph “Blue” penned by the author, then by coupling this epitaph with a second epitaph, a copy of a letter to Lucy from John.
The title Blue Physics lends itself to duality – the physical and the metaphysical, arguably. Blue may be perceived as sad, moody, down, it denotes color. Color is a noun, but more specifically it is an abstraction. What does it mean to perceive blue? The perception of blue is subjective. The feeling of blue is also slippery. Juxtaposed with “Physics”, the reader’s perception is already uncertain. The mind cannot fully make sense of this abstraction while it is simultaneously tasked with this scientific noun.
We can define physics, but the mind cannot really process or hold onto Blue Physics without processing the title as a question. What is blue physics? Is there such a thing? Is the title merely poetic, made-up? Is it a thing or is it a mood/color/severance of blue?
The two words are a phrase meant to conflate into a new meaning, another meaning. It confuses because it merges two images and a word that is “focused on understanding the fundamental properties of matter, energy, and interactions…” (Newton)
The laws of physics explain how objects behave in the world like how gravity works. This author knows the speed of life; it’s in the physics of her work. She also knows that the laws of physics explain how objects behave in the world. Everything depends upon the red wheelbarrow of Williams. What he did not say is every action depends on a reaction: Bertolini’s principle.
The speaker allows time to function as law. The past is always with us, as is the present is in the future. (Eliot)
Beginning with an abstraction using color, proliferates the idea that there is a strange and maybe illogical congruency between physics and feeling – experience and materiality. The event of this collection unfolds dramatically. The speaker is the observer, the witness, to the subjective experience. This also makes her a participant. One who observes but also participates, is the law of interaction: the Schrödinger Cat Theory.
We cannot witness something without changing, we are not static. The observer participates in the exchange of time and matter. This poet is right to sequence her poems in what initially appears as chronological order. We agree to perceive time as linear through beginnings, deaths, losses, and experiences that force us to meet ourselves, those experiences that challenge our identity, our sanity, our sense of the world and the environment.
The poem, “Blue” is the traumatic telling of an event that can only be written abstractly through the piecing together of life’s universal events that we can categorize and make sense of, or at least grapple with. When we use language to speak about past experiences, we do not relive them or necessarily make sense of them. By contrast, this collection of poems is a sort of psychological undertaking that surrounds the central trauma of the speaker.
We know poetry tells truths but in telling truths, the poet makes use of her imagination. We cannot assume a poem is telling a truth, but do we? It is hard to think of Wordsworth and Coleridge not walking across the Lake District, wind in their hair, talking of the French Revolution, or Blakes’ visions tormenting him. But there are poets who use a persona to fictionalize their experience or who lie altogether. Whoever said poets were ethical? Poets are drunks, cheaters, like on their income tax, beat their girlfriends, cheat on their partners, and more.
Arguably, we hold poets to a higher stander than prose writers who use their experiences verbatim and call it fiction. Do ethics matter in poetry?
For this poet, ethics matter. As does the complicated telling (or not telling) of a trauma that is embed in the DNA of this collection. After a trauma experience the person is changed; she sees through the lens of the trauma. After 48 years the writer gives herself a narrative through cognitive flexibility and an intelligence that comes from everything around her and reframes it. The light is hidden in letters that are inherent in words. One must be able to hear anything. This poet does just that. It is the meaning underneath the message. In trauma writing you must engage the “right” brain and put all the details together to make a narrative. You must escape anxiety by using details and tolerating being in the dark. This means you must accept living with ambiguity. Mary Lou Buschi is more than okay with ambiguity.
The third section of Blue Physics has become the past again. In “Cyclone”, the father and daughter reenter the past. They board a metal carnival car with “no door/just a flimsy belt that stretched over our laps.” There were “screams/some laughter broke through the whip and crack/as the car careened over the track.” The last line of the final couplet is “I don’t know if my father had any fun at all.” What the speaker omits is whether she has her own memory of fun. This omission is consistent with the rips in time and memory itself.
In “The Day Room” reality is switched. The speaker says, “Maybe it was that my parents had told me my brother/was hit by a car, rather than shot in front of his car.” Later, the speaker reads something about her brother that doesn’t jibe. “The Day Room” begins “In the middle of my life, I find myself back in high school/ where, years ago, I swallowed a handful of pills, landing in/ a psych ward for two weeks…” It lands after a Dear Lucy letter, now more abbreviated, changed by the past. The evidence of this resonates after the speaker turns thirty, culminating in “How I’ve missed my life.”
In “Black Maria” John resurfaces in the speaker’s dream. Again, he is erased.
For years I dreamed you were alone
in a cheap hotel room
I’d drive there to find you
but I when I opened the door you were gone.
The poem is not a simple narrative. It is fragmented: The speaker experiences the re-experiences the trauma. “Should we order in, your favorite dumplings?/John do you feel the sun?” The poem moves to a confession: John, who would you be now? You at 75/and me waiting 42 years. The longing does not dissipate.
“1991” is a redacted poem where we see the names Warner, 32, known as Robert Buschi, the poet’s last name, who was shot once in the head over a romantic grudge, prosecutors say. It seems that more of the truth is revealed here. Is this really the case? We must consider what has been concealed in so many lines blacked out. There is less we know in a dear Lucy poem.
The poems flicker, they orbit – there is a sense of the family pretending to be normal.
The poem, “Coda” is quintessentially related to the trauma event. It is significant that he reader only gets glimpses of this of the event. We participate in the speaker’s disorganized memory. The poem has seven parts, but the first part is not numbered. After Part V the poem reverts to a revised part IV. The poem then jumps to Part VII. There is no Part VI. This is where memory does not function: memory is withheld from the speaker: Part II-VII revisits a Dear lucy letter. Parts of lines six and seven are redacted after John states, “I couldn’t begin to tell you/what’s happened! I truly believe we became very/close friends in Nov – Jan” . Words are blacked out then “I hope the (black out) – The next line continues in black out. Until we see “please call me at 201-822-3342/and I will fill you in!” He signs “Love/ John”. There are extra spaces between “begin” and “to tell you” and “believe” and “we”. This indicates instability or interruption of the mind’s ability to communicate. The narrative breaks apart in Part IV. John pleads, “This code–/ (stanza break with white space) Please break it.” In Part V the speaker writes in first person “looks back at them” in two couplets – gathers control. The fragmentation is further realized in the second Part IV which begins “Dear” on a line of its own. The name is omitted. In Part VII the speaker sees the family as “a body/ a central heart/it’s really a tree, splitting…”
The closer the speaker aligns herself with the traumatic event, the further disruption of language and coherency.
1. The poems seem to be driven backwards, in memory –
2. In “Falling” we see two versions of the truth. The speaker deflects, using the word “metaphor.”
These poems hold the truth to the traumatic event but the paradox in trauma writing is that you can’t remember trauma, you can only recall the memory of it. Two separate things.
Trauma is in the body. The writing is the way to heal the wound of the trauma held in the body.
The poet uses detailed language in many of the poems that directly refer to the trauma wound. She even notices in “Kiss Kill” “the skin on my legs blooming with purple …” In “Girls” the poem breaks into white spaces, leaving room for silence, for recollection, for the reader to process. The speaker says “The truth, he could have been my granddaddy, uncle, or even/ my father, but wasn’t…” Later in the poem, she says, “…the width of the sky torn…” Although the poem is clearly about rape, it is not the original trauma that is the central impetus for the collection. The original trauma is can only be reckoned with by circling around what cannot be remembered.
Blue Physics is an understatement. Here are the lyrics to “Natural Blue” that the author references in her notes.
When I first saw you
The sky, it was such a natural blue…”
“Chicory burns grass at your knees
Walk forward from your open wound
Live in dreams, I remain forever
Inside the colors you’ve shown me.
–from Natural blue by Julie Byrne
Readers will follow the poems to the end that circle back to the beginning of the Blue Physics, where the first epitaph is the closest the speaker can remember the initial trauma experience. Blue Physics is an achievement of the highest order. Mary Lou Buschi is a poet to reckon with. She stands on the shoulders of no giants.
About the reviewer: Cynie Cory is a poet (“American Girl,” New Issues Press 2004), playwright and essayist. Cynie grew up in Marquette, Michigan. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and florida State University, where she earned a Ph.D. Her poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Shade, Verse, and Western Humanities Review. She currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida.