Reviewed by Keith Kopka

Brightword, Kimberly Burwick's latest collection, and her sixth collection overall, is an exquisite lyrical exploration of fear and love set against meditations on the natural world. This format allows the speaker to explore the overarching theme of her son's mortality, and the ways in which we are all at the mercy of our bodies, as well as the systems, random or otherwise, that order and govern our extant and corporeal interactions with the world around us.

Formally, this collection is an absolute pleasure to read. The poems are organized into three sections—"Cardiac," "Sensorium," and "Benthic"—which allow Burwick to deliver her lyrics in untitled, sensory bursts of nine to twelve lines. The result of this formal coordination is that each section of the collection reads as a singular lyric meditation in connection to its section's titular theme. Each poem within each section feels as though it is layered on top of the previous one through Burwick's continual use of natural imagery as a controlling conceit. This conceit serves as a means to support the collection's weightier themes related to the illness of the speaker's son. On a technical level, it also builds tension within the language of these poems. This is also a result of Burwick's enviable sonic acrobatics. These poems move and sing with rhythms that, to me, are the true strength of this collection. In one of the strongest poems from the "Cardiac" section, Burwick writes:

On the rough edges of blue noise, crickets wing
our blunt crossing, crown of them crust

the wheat, they tilt and mood our ramble
until we stop at the buried boundless field,

see a bird minding her young, the desperate
lucid end of any day, this diameter

of nest large and simple to fill
with scar, and there is more—warm current

of each octave, the great palace of summer
after, and before, and after

This excerpt is formally representative of how a majority of the poems in the collection are lineated. Most of the lines throughout Brightword are in couplets, a form that generally slows a reader's pace. However, because of Burwick's virtuosic use of sonics, she controls the pace of each of these lyrics on a line-by-line level. The result of this control is a flow that compels the reader to instinctively move between poems, as well as sections, more quickly. In fact, I read this book cover to cover in one sitting (a rare thing for me with a collection of poems). This momentum is one of the collection's strongest elements, as it allows for what is ultimately at stake in this collection, the life of the speaker's child, to rush over the reader in the same way it overwhelms and rushes over the speaker.  

Brightword takes its title from a Paul Celan poem that actively links the intersection of language and the visceral self:

Near, in the aorta's arch
In bright blood:
the brightword

At the heart of this collection (no pun intended), is the cardiovascular condition of the speaker's son. Through the invocation of the heart, this excerpt from Celan is thematically linked to the poems within Brightword. The "bright blood" of these poems is not only the physiological blood of mother and son, but it is also the metaphorical blood of the world that surrounds the speaker. It can be found in rabbits and ivy, in soil and buffaloberries, and even in the winged ants her son crushes. Through Burwick's detailed and exquisite descriptions of the environment, this collection builds a world for readers to inhabit. It is a world in which nature, its beauties and uncontrollable mysteries, is connected to the language that we use to describe it and to foster the perception that we can control its elemental aspects.

Language has no real means to control nature. It is woefully unequipped. This seems to be an essential part of the argument that Burwick's poems are making. No matter how precise the language that one uses to codify the natural, we are all still at the mercy of nature. Similarly, the speaker's son, no matter how much is researched or quantified about the workings of his heart, is still at the mercy of his condition. By drawing parallels between the fragility of the speaker's son, the power of nature, as well as the simultaneously powerful and fragile nature of language through the use of the lyric form, Burwick argues that there is beauty in what we work to accept and embrace, even if we can't control it. In the last section, "Benthic," she writes:

I think nature can hear us
likes to hear

what we say, I set a little fire
I set a little soul out

for earth,
let me hunt the juniper burn

to give the continent
love, the delicate wake

we were at birth . . .

Brightword is a collection filled with quiet, imagistic tension that clearly illustrates Burwick's skill as a lyric poet. Through her reflective interrogations of nature, which serve as a backdrop for an intricate exploration of familial love and human fragility, Burwick presents her readers with a set of poems that feel cohesive, each one as necessary as the one that comes before, in order to create a world for readers to inhabit. Burwick's world is one that allows for image, language, and rhythm to take center stage in ways that make the epiphany of vulnerability acceptable, even pleasurable, rather than fear-inducing. Brightword shows readers how fortunate they are to be so much at the mercy of the world, especially one as lyrical as Burwick's.