Ginnungagap: The Space Between Reviewed by Erin McKnight
Life is indeed begat in the collection’s 15 poems, its spheres of before and after colliding in a void of “in-between.” It is within this “silence/ between caresses” that the unspoken desire to return home—to the place nestled between the shore of birth and the horizon of death—is conjured in a polished, haunting eloquence. Like shells littering a whitewashed beach, Lightsey Darst’s individual works appear purposely strewn in the reader’s path as “wrecked home[s]” with “nothing to hear, nothing to say” —merely “rock[ing] with the wave.” It is evident, however, that although sea water will pass between the shells’ torn lips, the salty and sterilizing stream will ultimately dry into coarse sand. In “the quiet face of the sea,” childhood is exposed as “never easy/and rarely happy,” as a place where the lies we construct as screening are split like fragile shells, emitting honesty into a future that not only “burst[s] in through the crack,” but severs Darst’s prose in two like the worm that crosses a cutting board in “Little St. George Island”:
And it is this replication, this maturation toward dissolution, that manifests most organically in the collection: the family dog in “Dog Days,” for example, is left decaying in the front yard, its “cave-mouth/ alive with flies,” only to rise up in “Lent,” and “walk forth/ and let us and the neighbors/ put our hands in his rusty sides/ and be amazed.” Clearly, in Ginnungagap, time moves across the calm sea face at times as a “reflected cloud.” Within its shadows, in poems like “The Little Book of Dishes,” vitriolic thunder threatens:
This bitter dish is one of the shells skipped across the ocean’s surface, cutting waves that ripple into a future place—yet always back again into the before. For, the collection exposes a frailty in family ties, a dilution that occurs as the water deepens and the earth beneath, holding the polished bones of a girl who practiced writing her name within the family Bible, softens with the rhythmic motion above. The sentimentality of searching for that home place between origin and destination is captured in the “July-hot blue weight” of blueberry-picking alongside a mother, loss dropping into hands busy with the joyous work. This grief is flawlessly rendered in “Miscarriage,” coupling the ocean’s spawn with the “vicious expertise” of stripping and preparing its scallops:
Indeed, the intrigue of Ginnungagap rests not in the shells the reader throws back into a “sea beat[ing] at the ragged edge,” but in the ripples cast—in the “dark something sing[ing] our name/ reverberating.” The ultimate realization that we are never free of the spheres in front of and behind us, that our body is “worth/ a price,” our names forming a “sound that expires,” and that we’re not loved “the way [we] want,” endures in the washed-up seashells that are content simply to rock in Ginnungagap’s ocean of everything and nothing... where “all it knows/ is its wild method.” What Lightsey Darst’s Ginnungagap offers the reader is the conviction that enough ripples in any body of water will ensure a stillness and sense of serenity.
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Erin McKnight is a Scottish writer now living in Dallas, and is Fiction Editor for Prick of the Spindle. Her writing has been widely published online and in print, in venues including flashquake, Ginosko Literary Journal, and PRECIPICe. Her short nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing with a specialization in fiction, and is currently at work on an MA in literary linguistics.
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