In Accelerated Silence by Brooke Matson
Milkweed Editions, 2020
Brooke Matson’s In Accelerated Silence is a study in grief, how grieving leaves us anchorless, how it splits us open, utterly cleaves us. From its first poem, “Ode to Dark Matter,” I am: “rudderless,” “a boat unmoored.” The poems, Matson’s second poetry collection, center on the cancer diagnosis and death of a lover. Just as the poems’ persona cannot escape the horrible reality of this disease, Matson is relentless with her readers. She doesn’t spare our feelings; she doesn’t let us bow out. In fact she orders: “Don’t pretend you’re not a part of this.”
I purchased In Accelerated Silence partly because of this back-cover blurb by Nicky Beer: “Using the idioms of biology, chemistry, physics, and astrophysics, Brooke Matson composes lyrics of grief and beauty. . . . For anyone who has ever mourned deeply and loved fiercely, this is your book.” I didn’t know how apropos Beer’s assessment was or how profoundly In Accelerated Silence would affect me. It’s not often every single poem in a book guts me to the point of sleeplessness. It’s less often that every poem’s last few lines feel like a physical kick, with endings like loaded exclamation points. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever been mauled so deeply by someone else’s grief. But that’s what this book has done to me. The poems’ spiritual and emotional agonies—so devastatingly lyrical—are entirely relatable to my own.
The idea that grief, “a plane beyond moan,” is universal but also extremely personal is present throughout the book. Matson employs specific images to underscore this idea. She takes the elements of the physical world—from the microscopic atoms, electrons, and neurons to larger bodies (oceans, blue whales)—and interweaves them with the planetary systems, astronomical phenomena, and further, the “wild unknown.” She associates the unfamiliar with the visceral familiar, juxtaposing the distant untouchable, unknowable heavenly bodies against her lover’s body, his skin, chest, hips, thighs, fingers, hands. These associations symbolize both the struggle to wrap one’s mind around impossible-to-understand loss and the drive to unearth the most elusive of answers.
Unanswerable questions rove their way throughout the entire book. The poem “Maybe” depicts a Magic 8 ball used in childhood that one day “stopped answering.” Words that emphasize the search for answers—“hypothesis,” “explain,” and variations of “ask” or “asking”—are interspersed with specific questions such as, “[w]hat is the nature of darkness,” and “who can be blamed for unexplained cancer.” Further, Matson repeats the words “question” and “answer” throughout the book, culminating in these brazen lines in section iii of the poem “Law of the Conservation of Mass” entitled Operating Room:
Those dead scientists asked a question that killed
and we are still
dying slowly from the answer.
Matson asserts that even when answers come, they are unfavorable, even devastating. The ultimate result leaves our “[p]rimal need to know,” dissatisfied. In turn, we become “broken like dandelions in a hurricane,” unanchored as “drifting debris of dead stars,” “spinning like a galaxy.” Further, we grow bereft, desperate, and vulnerable, like the titular animal in “Elegy in the Form of an Octopus.” This creature’s lack of a protective “exoskeleton means vulnerability.” As Matson laments:
Her tentacles fumble the mussel
at the edge of the tank. I’ve been
that desperate lately, willing to break
delicate things for hunger’s sake . . .
Anyone who has ever grieved has known that desperation. Matson’s mastery of language underscores the gamut of emotions we go through as we grieve. As such there isn’t anything these 38 poems don’t make us feel. Sorrow and devastation wedge tightly against something akin to amazement. In “Orionid Meteor,” when she describes physical touch after radiation treatment, there is a moment of incredulous clarity where we recognize how close to truth these lines could be: “Trying to touch your face is like singing / as you’re burned at the stake—.”
Indeed, In Accelerated Silence is rife with anguish and heartbreak and displeasing truths:
Understand:
anything can be red,
usually when someone or
something splits open.
But we also understand there cannot exist such profound heartache without fervent love for someone, and so conversely the same objects that harbor such damage can bring with them an intense beauty or nostalgia. That image of splitting open becomes something exquisite in “Amaryllis.” “[T]he amaryllis split this morning into scarlet / tongues after I made love to him or rather / to his ghost.” So while the answers to the hard questions are still elusive and there are times of feeling utterly directionless, for the one left adrift, Matson offers this as a possible anchor: “All matter orbits what it adores.” As we read In Accelerated Silence, we find the tiny grains of beauty, “the brushstrokes at the corner of his eyes,” and remember this truth: “we are more than our breaks.”
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Michelle McMillan-Holifield is a recent Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. Her work has been included in Boxcar Poetry Review, Nelle, Sky Island Journal, Stirring, The Collagist, The Main Street Rag, Whale Road Review, and Windhover, among others. She hopes you one day find her poetry tacked to a tree somewhere in the Alaskan Wild.