Aileron by Geraldine Connolly
Terrapin Books, 2018
What a gorgeous book. This was my first thought when I saw Aileron. The cover art by LM Grimes is strangely arresting: a photographic image of white feathers shaped into a fan floating on a field of black, suggesting flight and stasis all at once. My second thought was a question: What is an aileron? A wing? Is it a bird? In fact, I learned, it’s a small hinged flap on the far edge of an airplane wing. In this, her fifth book, Connolly’s hinged wing carries her poems not only through the geographies of her life, but also back and forth through time, cutting through fixed boundaries of past, present, and future. She travels from an idyllic past on her childhood family farm, to adulthood and its inevitable disappointments, and onward toward old age and into the imaged future. She cultivates wisdom and resilience along the way, a perspective that makes her admittedly sad and disillusioned by the loss and idealized happiness she left behind.
The poet recognizes that personal loss is an inevitable consequence of aging, but she also sees how the earth has become degraded over time: piece by piece, her family’s farm was lost to oil rigs, rivers and air became polluted, animals became extinct. Her childhood enthusiasms were lost, too. Greed and misunderstanding broke bonds of long-held trust, family members died or became estranged. Mourning the loss of hope and the promises of the past, she accepts the world she sees from her heightened, winged vantage point.
Once like a flower, I wanted to be good.
Once I prayed and obeyed.
But something must always happen.
Say, a betrayal.
Bad birds come to rest
A weed turns into a stave.
Between birth and death, both joy and despair arise. Emotions flutter as memories lift the poet up and then cast her back down into despair. It is such movement that is the engine behind this collection. With aviator-like acrobatics, Connolly affirms:
What I can count on is vacillation.
I tilt and swerve, I fly toward
a sky that spins and tumbles.
In one of the most intriguing poems in the collection, “The Hardware of the Brain,” Connolly takes the reader on a fantastically scenic tour of her mind as she goes through the internal machinations of searching for a word she has forgotten, a word that has been
lost among the glittering ancestors of thought
pulsing their messages over and over like water
through pipes down the long roads, pushing through,
trying to find its way past the tractor trailers
and the taxis…
She flails mentally, yet within the detritus of her mind’s faltering, there’s a strange hopefulness: her thoughts have antecedents that can be followed. And her body is connected to her mind. She can reach for the keyboard and find traction and perhaps even a brand new idea:
The bright wings
are flapping upward. Wheels are revolving.
Sparks are flying. In this cold and brittle landscape,
someone is trying to start a fire.
This is a poet at the height of her craft reaching to the depths of her soul, calling out to a failing world that beauty and melancholy are everywhere intertwined. Her expertly crafted collection delivers both comfort and grief in lush, feathery abundance.
Mary Peelen is a poet and writer who lives in San Francisco. Her first poetry collection, Quantum Heresies, won the 2018 Kithara Book Prize and is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. Her work has appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Massachusetts Review, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily, Poetry Review (UK), New American Writing, and elsewhere.