Reviewed by Robert Dunsdon
Unruly Tree
by Leslie Ullman
Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series
University of New Mexico Press
Aug 2024, Paperback, 96 Pages, ISBNL 9780826366702, $18.95usd
Rather than follow a linear route through a collection I’m reviewing, I like to drop in occasionally and have a nose around, picking a flower or two, brooding over the landscape to get an idea of where I am. Having tripped over the delightfully unhinged and snappily titled “Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do and do the last thing on the list”, I was more than a little intrigued, and keen to know more about Leslie Ullman’s world. Gratifyingly, I found Unruly Tree as appealing as it is skilfully composed, and as variously irregular as at first suggested.
Such a rum title as quoted above is explained by the fact that each poem here is named after one of the 110 cards in a boxed set called “Oblique Strategies”, each of which is intended, via a brief and occasionally cryptic line, to offer a sort of kick-start to the imagination. To build a body of work from these prompts is a nice idea (if a little ironic, considering Ms Ullman’s experience and inventiveness) and the result is an accomplished compilation detailing her expanded notions of the creative process and the re-appraisal of her perspectives generally. It’s an idea which allows her entry into her very own playground, and rather like Paul Klee “taking a line for a walk”, the poet is free to follow a path of her choosing without necessarily knowing where it will end.
That opportunity leads her to question accepted norms in the arts; to champion the frowned upon, for example, such as the colours:
Puce.
Chartreuse.
Magenta the shade of
raw beef left in the sun.
or to look askance and seek inspiration not from the stonemason’s completed cathedral, but from “the beautiful failures of his youth.” Why not let an oboe take the part of First Violin, she asks, and why be afraid of silence?
Let an absence expand
harmony threads,
space between notes a hammock
for reverie. And words?
Where might we be
with breath alone?
Drawing “Infinitesimal gradations” from the deck, Ullman offers us an appreciation of a particular aspect of JMW Turner’s art, wondering at his rare and precious talent of intimation; of suggesting the nebulous, the not altogether real, through his invisibly delicate brushwork and wide-awake sensitivity. It’s a gift which enables him to miraculously summon the flimsiness of light filtered through cloud, the indefinite atmosphere between a frothy sea and a lowering sky, and to blur hard edges to imply accelerated motion. The poem concludes with a fine passage describing his portrayal of a ghost-moon displaying: “a fullness so see-through, so maybe-not- / there, we wonder if we pieced it ourselves / from a fragment of vanished light”. Ullman submits that he leaves “a legacy of slow dissolves”, which is very well put. It is a rounded poem, a poem of artless clarity constructed around what is in essence a sort of conjuring trick.
A piece which confirmed my initial assessment of Ullman’s worth urges us to “Listen to the quiet voice”, where an almost transcendental feeling is rescued from the debris of abandoned lots, tired streets, weeds and cement. Atmospheric and vivid, it’s a little gem. And I must give a mention to a splendidly off-kilter poem under the heading “Ghost Echoes”. In discussing the act of running a moistened finger around the rim of a wine glass to resurrect a song planted long before “…in the glassblower’s / breath and blue flame.” it confers a sort of blessing on what is generally considered an annoyance. It’s nicely judged and typical of the poet’s approach to the everyday, the seemingly banal.
Poet, teacher, jewellery maker and, somewhat incongruously perhaps, ski instructor, Leslie Ullman has a lot of experience to mine; a stock of interactions and exposure which she calls on to combine a strain of resigned wisdom with an eager inquisitiveness to produce poems of crafted subtlety. Technically astute, she’s able to discourse on anything from being distracted by the goings on at a nearby construction site, to the characteristics of the component parts of an orchestra.
Had you considered, for instance, that the violin speaks breeze, that the French horn is redolent of brandy and red livery; had it struck you that the trombone is early autumn sun or the tuba “beer keg and packed dirt, boots thumping / joyfully and a little drunk…”? Such observations were encouraged by the injunction to “Emphasize differences”, but the poem goes on most pleasingly to tell us how all these instruments, at odds with their fellows, are marshalled; how they are kept in line by the maestro, by the composer’s array of dancing symbols, to bring into being “a superior voice of voices” that in its glory:
…fills the warrior with kindness, the despot
with self-forgetfulness, the poor with abundance,
the world with a reason to save itself.
“What mistakes did you make last time?” enquires Brian Eno and the artist Peter Schmidt, joint authors of that compendium of jolts and provocations to which the fine poems here owe their conception. And the poet’s answer, from the prosaic gaffes of missing the exit or forgetting the emergency brake, to more worrying traits like carrying on talking once you’ve made your point, are too close to this reviewer’s experience to be comfortable. But what hit home most was a fault all too familiar to poets, a fault perfectly articulated in the final lines: “I lost my temper / I rushed the ending / Once I sat quietly and waited, empowered / by silence, but forgot to do it again.” Only a real poet, a poet possessed of artistic integrity, could come up with a coda like that.
And only a poet blessed with imagination and a solid understanding of poetics could embark on a project such as Leslie Ullman has devised here. Using “Oblique Strategies” as a basis for a disciplined exploration of the boundless possibilities of creative interpretation, she has produced a series of informed, entertaining and highly individual poems. Step into her world, as I did, and ready yourself for a treat, because she has indeed culled the best fruit from an unruly tree.
About the reviewer: Robert Dunsdon is from Abingdon in the UK. His poetry has been published in Ambit, Allegro, The Crank, Candelabrum, The Cannon’s Mouth, Decanto, Pennine Platform, Picaroon, Purple Patch and others. His book reviews have featured in Tupelo Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, The Lit Pub, Sugar House Review, Colorado Review, Poetry International and Los Angeles Review.