The Same Amount of Ink, Susan Berlin
reviewed by Deirdre Grace Callanan
In the personal acknowledgments of her terrific new collection, Susan Berlin mentions her brother’s gift on her 12th birthday, an album of Dylan Thomas reading “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Recalls Berlin, “I listened over and over…and I fell in love with the music words can make.”
Words’ music: certainly one thing I want from any book I read, perhaps particularly an expectation for every book of poems I open. And that is the gift I was given by Berlin’s The Same Amount of Ink. That, and more.
In her own voice and style, Berlin’s work possesses attributes I also appreciate in three of my (other) favorite poets: Sharon Olds’s candor, Linda Gregerson’s intelligence, and Tony Hoagland’s wit.
As with Olds, Berlin shoots not from the hip but from the heart. They’re unflinching and undaunted. ‘This is my life, sans gloss or editing,’ their poems declare.
Both Gregerson and Berlin are linguistically deft, syntactically and metaphorically complex without a trace of coyness. Their poems’ beguiling appearance of ease I suspect has arrived after ruthless, relentless revision.
With Hoagland, Berlin shares a talent for irony—what surprises greet readers when the narratives suddenly turn. “Blue by Default” begins as a description of a stranger the narrator encounters at the beach. As he nears her, the persona shifts her attention to, “the woman moving toward me through no volition/of her own,” a woman who is in fact a tattoo on the man’s chest of a nude in spike heels. In the final stanza, Berlin fixes on the woman’s eyes: “Eyes like decals,/dull as chronic pain. Blue by default but flatter than that,/faded down from the once brilliant black.”
The reader of poetry who picks up a collection, reads it straight through then shelves it forever is that listener to music who downloads an artist’s latest album, plays it once then never again. And that reader/listener inhabits a chilly apartment in Vladivostok and is slowly dying of ennui.
No, dear readers, that person is not you. You have piles of books, do you not. Well read, better re-read, even better read aloud to a companion. “Listen to this,” I tell my husband, who looks up patiently, expectantly from his computer. And he does.
Through my reading, re-reading, then reading aloud The Same Amount of Ink, the text’s invitation heightened. In the first poem, I ride beside Berlin on the subway as she encounters a school friend she hasn’t seen in thirty years. I travel with her through that half century, share her childhood, marriage, divorce, illnesses and deaths as well as her keen delight in and attentiveness to the natural world.
And doesn’t that list sound ordinary? It is, ordinary and universal. The poems, however, transcend and transform. The proficiency of her craft is evident throughout, but perhaps most obvious in her structuring of “Waves and Light,” a poem dedicated to her brother.
In section I, he is, “one month into the coma”. The form echoes the content, drifting as it does without punctuation, capitalization, stanza breaks. In many of its thirty-one lines, a sole white space interrupts a litany of images of the ICU. On the facing page, order has been restored to her brother, thus also to the poem. Section II contains seven stanzas complete with standard conventional usage. It’s stunning, opening with this couplet: “In a coma just shy of a year, my brother/opens his eyes and tells me where he was.” It ends with this: “and that man was Beethoven/ and all the light came from him.”
The dissolution of her parents’ marriage is made as fresh as Pound’s imperative through much of the book’s opening section. In “The Armoire,” her father has left “the master bedroom and moved himself/into the spare” where there’s an armoire used to store linens. “These, he lugged//to the basement, dumped them on the bag/of lime used for killing weeds.” One day, with “the need to know what he held sacred,” her mother opened the armoire where she found, “a wall calendar not meant for any nail,/the square of each day of each month/crossed out by a thick black X,/including the month they were in/and half of the next.”
“False Witness” opens with the admission about her now-absent father, “There must have been some good in him,” then, “True, there was that one time he spent the entire/day with us, those pictures he took:” followed by stark images. He’s taken them on a bus to Coney Island where there were “green mildewed boats” and “off-season gusts,” and a shot of her and her brother’s “heads/cocked at the same strained angle, our lips/puckered like fish, pulling at the cotton candy’s sticky mass.” Berlin is the empress of endings, her close here chilling: “all the exposures he took—the remainder/ of the roll—of rides we didn’t get to go on/restaurants where we didn’t eat.”
Yet this collection is far from glum. If you feel in need of cheering up after the above, I refer you to “Fat Crow Above Me,” “Richer For Its Absence,” and “Gifts From A Crow,” each optimistic in its particularity, as is “Vanishing Point At The Inlet.” Reading it, the volume’s final poem, I’m still beside Berlin, now parked in a sycamore’s shade, my hand over hers as she writes on the tree’s blank shingle, “Yes.”
“Yes,” the affirmation which ends Joyce’s Ulysses…and Berlin’s book.
Words’ music: certainly one thing I want from any book I read, perhaps particularly an expectation for every book of poems I open. And that is the gift I was given by Berlin’s The Same Amount of Ink. That, and more.
In her own voice and style, Berlin’s work possesses attributes I also appreciate in three of my (other) favorite poets: Sharon Olds’s candor, Linda Gregerson’s intelligence, and Tony Hoagland’s wit.
As with Olds, Berlin shoots not from the hip but from the heart. They’re unflinching and undaunted. ‘This is my life, sans gloss or editing,’ their poems declare.
Both Gregerson and Berlin are linguistically deft, syntactically and metaphorically complex without a trace of coyness. Their poems’ beguiling appearance of ease I suspect has arrived after ruthless, relentless revision.
With Hoagland, Berlin shares a talent for irony—what surprises greet readers when the narratives suddenly turn. “Blue by Default” begins as a description of a stranger the narrator encounters at the beach. As he nears her, the persona shifts her attention to, “the woman moving toward me through no volition/of her own,” a woman who is in fact a tattoo on the man’s chest of a nude in spike heels. In the final stanza, Berlin fixes on the woman’s eyes: “Eyes like decals,/dull as chronic pain. Blue by default but flatter than that,/faded down from the once brilliant black.”
The reader of poetry who picks up a collection, reads it straight through then shelves it forever is that listener to music who downloads an artist’s latest album, plays it once then never again. And that reader/listener inhabits a chilly apartment in Vladivostok and is slowly dying of ennui.
No, dear readers, that person is not you. You have piles of books, do you not. Well read, better re-read, even better read aloud to a companion. “Listen to this,” I tell my husband, who looks up patiently, expectantly from his computer. And he does.
Through my reading, re-reading, then reading aloud The Same Amount of Ink, the text’s invitation heightened. In the first poem, I ride beside Berlin on the subway as she encounters a school friend she hasn’t seen in thirty years. I travel with her through that half century, share her childhood, marriage, divorce, illnesses and deaths as well as her keen delight in and attentiveness to the natural world.
And doesn’t that list sound ordinary? It is, ordinary and universal. The poems, however, transcend and transform. The proficiency of her craft is evident throughout, but perhaps most obvious in her structuring of “Waves and Light,” a poem dedicated to her brother.
In section I, he is, “one month into the coma”. The form echoes the content, drifting as it does without punctuation, capitalization, stanza breaks. In many of its thirty-one lines, a sole white space interrupts a litany of images of the ICU. On the facing page, order has been restored to her brother, thus also to the poem. Section II contains seven stanzas complete with standard conventional usage. It’s stunning, opening with this couplet: “In a coma just shy of a year, my brother/opens his eyes and tells me where he was.” It ends with this: “and that man was Beethoven/ and all the light came from him.”
The dissolution of her parents’ marriage is made as fresh as Pound’s imperative through much of the book’s opening section. In “The Armoire,” her father has left “the master bedroom and moved himself/into the spare” where there’s an armoire used to store linens. “These, he lugged//to the basement, dumped them on the bag/of lime used for killing weeds.” One day, with “the need to know what he held sacred,” her mother opened the armoire where she found, “a wall calendar not meant for any nail,/the square of each day of each month/crossed out by a thick black X,/including the month they were in/and half of the next.”
“False Witness” opens with the admission about her now-absent father, “There must have been some good in him,” then, “True, there was that one time he spent the entire/day with us, those pictures he took:” followed by stark images. He’s taken them on a bus to Coney Island where there were “green mildewed boats” and “off-season gusts,” and a shot of her and her brother’s “heads/cocked at the same strained angle, our lips/puckered like fish, pulling at the cotton candy’s sticky mass.” Berlin is the empress of endings, her close here chilling: “all the exposures he took—the remainder/ of the roll—of rides we didn’t get to go on/restaurants where we didn’t eat.”
Yet this collection is far from glum. If you feel in need of cheering up after the above, I refer you to “Fat Crow Above Me,” “Richer For Its Absence,” and “Gifts From A Crow,” each optimistic in its particularity, as is “Vanishing Point At The Inlet.” Reading it, the volume’s final poem, I’m still beside Berlin, now parked in a sycamore’s shade, my hand over hers as she writes on the tree’s blank shingle, “Yes.”
“Yes,” the affirmation which ends Joyce’s Ulysses…and Berlin’s book.
Deirdre Callanan has been writing and teaching on Cape Cod since 1981. She is also on the faculty of The Washington Center for Psychoanalysis's New Directions writing program.