Sight Lines by Sandra Marchetti
Speaking of Marvels Press, 2016
Sandra Marchetti’s Sight Lines is a hybrid, environmental e-chapbook that contains an essay followed by five poems. Her keen attention to details in the world around her and her thoughtful, reflective style are a natural fit for environmental writing. She also has a healthy understanding of and respect for the tradition that she writes out of, opening with an Annie Dillard quote and examining a writer’s life. That said, this is not the humorless, overly serious delivery that some writers take. Lines like, “So I leave the house to plant and pick up pennies. There is no other creation myth but this,” inject a sense of playfulness that offsets the more serious examinations.
Marchetti also engages the reader by creating vivid images that are rich with meaning. In “Refrain,” she closes with “The coyote cast a wing / and three coronets / back to feign molting, / a confetti whorled white come red, come green.” The lines contain a great deal of sensory information while also maintaining a brisk pace, letting the reader walk with the speaker of the poem as she takes in the striking scene. These pieces run quickly, having a genuine sense of energy, but they hold up upon subsequent readings, keeping their immediacy and yielding surprising connections and subtleties that reward careful readings.
There are, of course, other successes in the chapbook. The slant rhymes in “Shadow” are naturally done and not distracting, but when the reader notices them, they add to both the rhythm and sonic coherence of the poem. This sort of work also allows the chapbook to feel aesthetically diverse, surprising the reader even at its compact length. In short, Sight Lines is a rewarding chapbook, using strong imagery and inventive stylistic and visual choices to create a text that is both personal and easily accessible while still tapping into a larger sense of the world. The opening quote from Annie Dillard contains the line, “I’ve been thinking about seeing.” In our hyper-visual culture, seeing is a good thing to think about, and this chapbook helps us to think about both what to look at and how to look.
Zeke Jarvis is an Associate Professor at Eureka College. His work has appeared in Posit, Moon City Review, and Bitter Oleander. His books include So Anyway… and In a Family Way.