Surface Impressions

reviewed by Peter Campion

published in Poetry, May 2003

Surface Impressions, by Stephen Sandy. Louisiana State University Press. $24.95 cloth; $16.95 paper.

A few years ago, after buying new eyeglasses with a stronger prescription, I had the sudden, unsettling suspicion that I had shrunk. Outside the store, each scrap of newsprint, each swirl of dirt, rippled with immediate presence. The ground itself appeared to be closer. Surface Impressions, Stephen Sandy's new book-length poem, reminded me of that curious and alarming afternoon. The poem records the events of a day-to-day life divided between Cape Cod, Manhattan, and Vermont. Memory and imagination find their place here too, as the poet includes scenes from childhood, as well as daydreams of his daughter's visit to Madagascar. And the book succeeds because, whatever the given landscape, Sandy makes the ground appear to be closer. Though he has none of the pretensions of so many explicitlytheoretical poets, he manages to embody what consciousness feels like: with concision and vivacity he portrays how emotions and thoughts collide with the sheer material of the world.

Verse diaries of this sort often depend solely on their subject matter, and fail to do anything compelling with the medium itself. Not so with Surface Impressions. Sandy has a unique gift for getting one image to segue into another with a fluid sharpness that any cinematographer would envy. This movement propels his book. The first section, for instance, begins with a description of walking on a beach, a description which quickly modulates into a scene from childhood, before returning to the oceanside. Here is the memory and the return:

A child, whole and looking on, who was about
to have his tonsils out lay on a white
sheet, his mother's hand in his when a nurse
gave him a balloon and smiled, saying, "now

"blow this up." The brown membrane went taut,
harder to inflate than red ones at parties. He watched
amazed, the sphere before his eyes grew large
as he sank back-grip loosened-mother gone,

it was sailing him off, clearest white gulps like this
onshore wind filling lungs with ozone-laden air,
and engine rumbling out there, low breathings as I sink
into lights above the dark; then joy, then nothing.

That last, long sentence is itself a virtuoso performance. Since the speed of Sandy's transition does not compromise the precision of the perceptions, you feel both the movement of the mind and the friction that material, present and past, exerts on the mind. And this is not mere local felicity. The small flashback here foreshadows the big return to childhood that occurs in the fourth section of the book.

Visual gifts can mask a poet's shortcomings. Even if we take great pleasure from imagery, speech remains the poet's medium. Yet Sandy's cinematic presentation never numbs his feeling for what Robert Frost famously called "sentence sounds." In the passage about the boy, for instance, we hear "harder to inflate than red ones at parties." The narrator's voice has made a sympathetic and humorous gesture toward incorporating the kid's thoughts and sensations. And this suppleness of tone invigorates the whole book. To listen to the poet moan about a heat wave, or marvel at new discoveries in astronomy, or gently mock teenagers milling outside a Counting Crows concert, is to hear the full range of a speaking voice brought to poetry.