Openwork and Limestone by Frances Boyle is a collection of poems to be read carefully. Boyle draws on many sources for inspiration. Her subjects include history, family relationships, art, nature, time/space, and five fascinating poems about Lil. But thematically, the collection is not as scattered as the range of subjects suggests. A line in the prologue poem, “Inhumed,” attunes us to a key theme – posed as a question that runs throughout the collection: “What flows unseen beneath our lives?” – holds it all together.
I am always fascinated by the way poets structure their manuscripts. Structurally, Boyle’s collection is divided into four sections, each beginning with an untitled poem.
In the first section’s prologue poem, the narrator asks: Shall I too play the scientist, / study prehistory in stone… as she imagines time-travelling with Le Guin. And she does travel, imagining Kate, my finespun grandmother who is leaving Ireland with No promise of a quick return (“That Faraway Place”). This poem includes one of the most haunting images of the collection: Kate leaves in a mothdance of handkerchiefs.
In the second section, we find tension between the blight-blasted and openings, and we continue to time-travel. In “Passage,” during the Solstice the family enters the passage tomb at Newgrange…
We squeeze along its length, shoulders brushing stone.
Reaching the chamber, see chevrons, sheaves, triple
//
spirals faint-carved on rock. Charred bone-bits, soot-
shadows. A tomb. Grave goods strewn on passage floor.
The daughter leaves; she couldn’t carry on. The poem concludes with …
I wish I’d had a lifeline to throw,
a silken cord for her safe passage back through time.
Are you reminded of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, the spool of thread?
In the third section prologue poem, there is a silent buzz / of hivemind hysteria and it is this section that we meet Lil. There are five intriguing Lil poems, and I want more of this fascinating character. As my mind went to Greek myth in the previous quote, here my mind leapt to Lilith, first wife of the Biblical Adam. In “Lil’s Rounds, She won’t be sucked under. She won’t drown. In “Singalong,” Lil reminds me of Yeat’s “A Crazed Girl” improvising her music. / Her poetry, dancing upon the shore.
Singalong
Lil was flotsam those years, never
quite sinking. Maybe she landed there
by happenstance; she wasn’t jetsam, no hands
delivered the overboard fling. When she flew
on her feet, whirled with spun eloquence
of fleet deer, she prefigured the bringing
of birdsong, commentary written
in runic, best executed in daytime,
accompaniment dipping at twilight to dirge.
In the final section, hope breaks through. In “Endurance,” Boyle writes: We’re hulking ships mired in frozen seas, / but spring is creaking open. The poems reconnect with earlier ones, as they do in “Tide of Limestone” in which the speaker crawls through caverns: The stuck place. / Dark matter filters us, / flows through our invisible nets. / We leave handprints, / scratches. Scant record. The final poem – “What Letting Go Means” – time travels through memory etched in glass. The speaker admonishes her sister to stand back from the fire, a plea (a hope) for the future.
Lacework and Limestone is Frances Boyles second poetry collection.
Available through your local bookstore or online: Openwork and Limestone. (Frontenac House Ltd., Okotoks, AB, 2022). ISBN 978-1-989466-43-8
Kathryn MacDonald 