Anthony Opal

A Review of Brooklyn Copeland’s Laked, Fielded, Blanked

​          Brooklyn Copeland’s latest chapbook, Laked, Fielded, Blanked, is an exploration of the ways in which language interacts with silence, or the ways in which lived experience interacts with the page, or the ways in which the reader interacts with the writer – in wakefulness. The collection contains three poems, “Morse,” “Notes on Vanishing” and “Seall,” and is about twenty pages long. However, page count can be misleading here, as each page contains only a small section of each poem, leaving the rest of the page empty. Or maybe empty is the wrong word. When I asked Copeland about the significance of blank spaces in her writing, she said:

​My poems have never been “long” or wordy, and a length of blankness, for me, holds nearly the same value as a string of words. I think words come to life when you give them room to breathe. When I see a lot of space on the page, I know that I should read the poem slowly. Even poems made up of a single word can be read slowly, you know? Once you’ve read the poem, you have enough elbow room to work out your reactions to the poem and relate the poem to your own experience.

          And this “elbow room,” as Copeland puts it, is not only found in the ample white spaces surrounding the text, but in the text itself, in the spaces and indentations that Copeland uses to create a certain syntax, soundscape, or image – the way a piece of paper is folded to give a single plane multiple dimensions. The first poem in the collection, “Morse,” begins:

Morse Lake forms
where the Big
creek meets

the Little creek—
bits of boat,
bits of dock

mark the spot--

          As the poem continues, Copeland goes on to speak of feeding rocks to diseased ducks, opening geodes, breaking hammers, and finding dead fish that smell “red.” All in all, a day at the waterfront that ends up sounding strangely familiar…yet utterly unique. And that’s the brilliance of it. Copeland’s poetry is not flashy, or “baroque,” as she puts it, but human in that it expresses one’s honest interactions with nature, others, and oneself with a straightforward originality that is hard to find in a poetic milieu dominated by the avant-garde and the mundane. The very musicality of Copeland’s language is the result of colloquial speech arranged in such a way that words expose themselves for the music that they already are.

​          In this way, Copeland is the sort of writer that, no matter her subject, is ever present in her poems. Even in an outward-looking nature poem such as “Notes on Vanishing,” Copeland’s energy can be felt in the precise imagery and playful language. One section reads:

Gravid stems
erupt.

The hale
yellows pale once

they’re plucked.

And then:

The smallness of this
colloquial cannot

muffle the full morning orchestra--

amphibious greens
clotting the trickle

of thaw. The tinny

fin flip and eyeflake flash—
small schools that

give shimmer in the dull

​sulk of wind.

          When I asked Copeland about “Notes on Vanishing,” she said that it’s a poem about, “…tribal Baltic-Finnic languages, some of which are truly vanishing. The idea runs parallel to vanishing natural landscapes, particularly in a part of the world that feels like my second home.” In this way, Copeland illustrates yet again just how much gravity can be contained (or not contained) in the be-coming void and empty spaces.

          The collection ends with the poem “Seall,” – perhaps the strongest of the three. It is a bodily poem in both subject and sound. Whereas the rhythms of “Notes on Vanishing” gesture toward the rhythms of nature, “Seall” gestures toward, or moves with, the rhythms of the body. One section reads:

Our pulses
gulp
in rhyme
upon release— our

bodies beyond
us
siphon,
​harbor.

          This is an example of Copeland’s covert profundity, using that which has been articulated in the first two poems about nature and the reservoir, and combining the two to illuminate the connectedness of the personal to the communal to the natural. In this way, Copeland is a meditative – even ‘confessional’ – poet who manages to transcend egoism without leaving behind her own personhood. The collection ends with two fragments that read:

Midnight
integral--
each night

an event--
we find in

mismatched
Coke glasses

Svedka, chokeberry

wine—I clutch
your musk
your brine

to my
breast

& goad

-

Star bands
tack layers

to longer days—
black satin,

white linen—
either,
always
​wide awake.

          These last two words, “wide awake,” seem a fitting end to the collection, as one has the sense after reading these poems that though Copeland is no blind idealist or naive dreamer, but rather someone who manages to write with a certain joy born of an unassuming openness toward the waking, lucid moment.





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Anthony Opal lives in Chicago where he is chapbook review editor for TriQuarterly Online and a grad student at Northwestern University. His poems have most recently appeared in Boston Review, Notre Dame Review, Harpur Palate, Permafrost, and The Greensboro Review.