The Riveting Allure of Disentanglement
An extended review and analysis of Diane Lowell Wilder’s Leap Thirty
By Marc Zegans
September 1, 2021
Wise, sensitive, sometimes quirky, always engaging, Leap Thirty, Diane Lowell Wilder’s first collection of poems—a fictive work, based in memory, delivered as discrete dispatches from an unnamed narrator’s personal interzone—deftly situates the entry, traverse, and exit of a thirty-year marriage between tales of an upbringing not fully digested and a life presently in transition.
Wilder’s framing of marriage as grand jeté, a spectacular span whose thrill lies in the certain knowledge that it cannot last, is a superb conceit. Absent context, a leap has no meaning. Wilder knows this and gives us poems beyond the bookends of the marriage remembered—establishing ground and runway in the life and rituals of youth, and traveling past the knee-shaking landing that concludes what has proven to be less than a fully realized life.
The verse in Wilder’s book, which looks back from an open horizon (and a yet-to-be articulated second life) at what it means to have formed, enacted, and broken with a defined self, flows smoothly. The poems, and the traverse across their range, vault gracefully into time as propulsive liquid, inviting blink-quick shifts from rapid spillways to memory’s deeper waters, this proffer gently fulfilled by the deft play—whisper rhymes and chiming consonances—of Wilder’s language, the elegant portrayal of high inner stakes roiling outwardly quiet lives, and a far-from-facile approachability that carries her reader swiftly on.
Wilder’s technique, like fine joinery, calls no attention to itself. Her concise compositions are not poemy. They do not self-importantly say, “Look at what a poem I am.” Rather, with a surety rare for a first collection, her work discreetly draws her reader into its softly situated sounds and rhythms, its varying pulses, and its barely noticed bounds, concentrating focus on its characters and its tastes, scents, dilemmas, conflicts, and liberations. In “Moves,” a much younger man announces to the poem’s fictive Me, “You can really move.” Wilder’s imaginatively recalled self, with sudden bravado, responds, “Let me show you how it’s done.” Unlike her braggadocious Me, Wilder the poet neither asks for permission nor visibly demonstrates the inner workings of the craft she simply makes manifest. There is no gap between her voice and the thing itself.
The unity between voice and experience is partly a function of meter. Wilder’s poems display a distinct vocal regularity, a sonic pacing grounded in object, image, impression, and vignette rather than conventional metric feet. In “Mother-Fear,” a harrowing poem that invokes the distressing implications of two small boots left on a rain-soaked tennis court, Wilder observes,
The girl hides: in the crib, in the pen,
in the tubes of paint I squeeze and distend.
These verses could be read as three anapests in the first, followed by an anapest, two iambs, and an anapest in the second, but to treat them as such would undercut the lines’ natural voice and their object-based metric structure. In reading these lines, eye and ear naturally group each verse into two metric units that coincide with its denotative elements:
The girl hides, in the crib . . . in the pen,
in the tubes of paint . . . I squeeze and distend.
This fusing of sound, image, and meaning, and the situatedness, specificity, and authenticity of Wilder’s patterning, mark her voice as original and contribute decisively to the interest of her work. Witness the final lines of “Mother-Fear”’:
I will get closer
to the boots today. I will look inside.
A label, a size, a name.
The experience of Wilder’s verses as felt, rather than formal, results also from her eschewal of heavy exoskeletal structures in favor of line- and stanza-specific sonic and visual devices nimbly merged into the text. A short stanza in “Mud Season”—“Spring will bring / boundaries of melt / and uncovered wells”—spreads a soft rhyme across the top line, then end-rhymes “melt” and “wells” in the second and third verses, shifting the rhyme scheme from horizontal to vertical. With this rotation, Wilder lingually binds the stanza at three vertices, sounding and rounding its upper-right corner but leaving free the lower left, defining graphically through rhyme the “boundaries of melt” to which the stanza’s second line refers. Consistent application of finesse of this order throughout Leap Thirty distinguishes Wilder’s finespun voice as novel and inventive, lends nuance to the material, and rewards repeated engagement.
Like the open-cornered stanza of “Mud Season,” the voice of Leap Thirty rings with freshness. The narrator, alive and experimenting, not yet situated in a life inscribed with clear purpose and durable features, conveys an awareness of boundaries that are present but ill-defined, a vibrant liminality that strips interpretive pieties nearly clean from her recollections:
Launched flat-footed, forward-loaded:
now my knees refuse my weight
and as I fall the dog still tugs,
pulling, pulling at her leash.
(From “Glorious Leap Thirty”)
These are living observations of a traveling soul, not reports that issue from the formal dictates of “a life” constructed as an entity separate from the self. Wilder and her imagined narrator are past that. And yet Wilder’s narrator is discrete from the poet—sly irony abounds.
A mainspring of Leap Thirty’s resonance and intuitive appeal is the poet’s fluid surfacing of familiars. Another is her facility in communicating the energy of objects in memory. From her 1970s middle-class American childhood, we are given linoleum, banana seats, a pearl-buttoned shirt, and Love’s Baby Soft. Small endowments from her family—a forty-year-old cactus, an ancient skillet, a basket that held black walnuts and retains their smell (or spell)—become vehicles for exploring lineage and the how the locus of meaning shifts from one generation to the next:
My mother said take it,
use it as a planter or
whatever. With a blade
I pair the flakes of carbon
from the base and think
of all the cornmeal mush
my great-grandmother
cooked in this . . .
(From “Provisions”)
Two cigarette holes in the skirt of the dress her mother wore the night she met her father transport Wilder’s narrator to that moment:
I can see the steps outside the club
and smell the smoke.
(From “Old Golds and Black Walnuts”)
We know that this episode and these parents are imagined because, as noted in Leap Thirty’s introduction, neither of Wilder’s real-life parents smoked.
Formed as fictions rather than confessions, these varied compositions are invitations to explore. They appear in different forms: windows lighting lives separate from our own, chains of arrivals and departures, dances with transient partners. Each asks the reader to join with the poet, embody the material, and discover, together, how things develop, even as the poems actively engage readers in their own memories. Reading Leap Thirty evokes the sensation of traveling with the poet through material that you both now share.
Beyond fashioning each poem as an invitation and incisively selecting poems that accord fully with the book’s title, Wilder adroitly incorporates an enlightening mid-level architecture into Leap Thirty’s design, locating the book’s thirty poems, their count mirroring the volume’s title, in five untitled but thematically coherent sections. The wisdom of employing this low-key structural device is amplified by the volume’s layout. Each poem in Leap Thirty is uniquely situated on a pair of facing pages, most adjacent to a blank page. Consequently, every transition from one poem to the next requires the reader to make a small physical leap. More blank pages intervene between each major section, creating a welcome interval between thematic groupings while demanding a sizable jump from one part to the next. The effect is subtle, but the process of leaping poem-to-poem, section-to-section physicalizes the book’s premise, bonding us, hop-skip-and-jump, to both its fictive protagonist and the poet herself.
• • •
Poems in the volume’s first section depict time before the leap, situating Wilder’s narrator firmly in family and place—
When I roared my Schwinn down this town’s
empty roads, invoking rural gods,
there was a joy in me like spark plugs.
(From “Landlocked”)
. . . I was nimble,
I knew frolic, I once got that close to grace
I had a dog named Honey, who would
lick my knees beneath the table . . .
(From “Glorious Leap Thirty)
—and demarcating the space between her beginnings and now-jarred memories of her youth, a separation bridged only by a soaring vault:
Glorious leap of thirty years, sleek-toed
jeté and arch of feet and then the meet
and slam of landing here beside the jar
in which I keep my youth . . .
• • •
Part 2 introduces the action, the complications, the confusion, and the fractured agency of adult life. Careering between relations with her former husband, flirtation, and a post-marital lover, these poems enter tellingly into the commerce between men and women and the complexities of our self-implicating choices:
My therapist asks if I enjoy
being a victim
I will make that mistake again
I will play for tips
I will play for your half
of half-uneaten sandwiches
(From “Ex-”)
He looks entranced,
clutching his drink, coming close . . .
(From “Moves”)
And I know a man
is there in my back room,
basking . . .
(From “Takeout”)
As Wilder’s narrator travels though this anthology of men, we begin to encounter a persistent self, an individual whose durable qualities appear in relief against the background of shifting dance partners and bedmates. It is here, within and without relationships, that her character becomes real.
• • •
Part 3, Leap Thirty’s middle section, constellates poems of keepsake, memory, and memento as vehicles for illuminating a grown child’s sustained involvement with (and the reanimation of) life threads via objects drawn from the past.
In “Partridge,” we see hope amidst the fracturing of family ritual: the narrator’s father carries a saw to cut the family Christmas tree, even as the family bickers; the narrator, having reached the age of privilege, joyfully chooses her first ornament, after which her sister blows a fuse and blasts a butter knife that she has socketed to unplug the lights. When the fuse is replaced by her father, the narrator, as child, rejoices: “Oh, my partridge sparkles.”
In “My Parents Throw a Party,” memory is mixed: “My dream confuses matzoh balls with crackers in the soup . . . ” Metaphors—“needle,” “turntable,” “radio . . . sky,” “sounds of skittering like a dog caught on marbles”—are tossed about. Illuminating facts are revealed (“My father earned medals and was given kisses, manly ones from men to men”), and perceptions, born of unnamed secrets (“The sense of the body as enemy . . . talking and disgorging crumbs . . . ”), are voiced. In the blended cocktail of this poem’s telling, Wilder masterfully places her reader in the experience of recurring signifier, a beacon that points to what is recalled yet remains unanswered. The party her parents threw ended long ago; what happened then is only now starting to make sense.
“Reproduction,” the third section’s final poem, concerns a curled photograph, whose subjects—“a woman,” “a boy,” and “a man”—“you,” reader and narrator, bring to life in dream, reuniting these photographic subjects in imagination before they fade from view as lives lost again. The poem’s narrative implicitly encodes this keepsake as a preserver of essences. The curled photograph, through the people whose features it represents, elicits our capacity to extend empathy backward. But the opening of captured images, as Wilder so ably demonstrates, is different from memory born of live contact, because reproduction and recollection inhabit different sentient spaces. Reproduction expands our lives beyond what we can directly touch; recollection affords the opportunity to make sense of what we, perhaps at a long-ago party, have experienced but may not yet know.
• • •
Having carried us through the roots of selfhood, discovery of what persists in our evolving selves, and the workings of meme and memory in our internal discourse, Wilder in the fourth section takes up the question of life in the middle: having kids; being a mother; what it means to have a formative effect on the lives of others while continuing to be treated as a child by one’s own parents (“But I’m a mom” having no influence on the latter).
Cast in the present tense, the poems here represent the narrator’s life in medias res, a parenting life made in overlapping scenes. Wilder’s poems replicate the experience of life in the middle—felt moments, instances of clarity achieved but always subject to the rush of the next. There’s an unassuming truth in this conveyance, one that renders her capture of the quotidian simultaneously familiar and captivating, with a magnetic strangeness that emerges in her naming of the real:
My daughter
puts a beet from the garden
in a glass baking dish
(canola oil)
(425 degrees).
(From “The Beet”)
The wyrd incarnated by these simple words stems from Wilder’s practice of bringing forward, and lending form to, actions that hold meaning but rarely enter memory. By denominating and rendering salient the simple things that define and alter our lives, her poems bring us into unexpected contact with how we make our fate, and how, for most, this process unfolds imperceptibly. Her capacity to parse what matters is acute, distinguishing the subtly laden from the trivial and making us know the difference. Consider her narrator in “Chalk and Release,” who gives us:
This: Put them to bed.
Feed them, bathe them,
wonder where one
has misplaced retainers
or sneakers or teeth.
None of the items in this litany are trivial, yet they will fade from memory when our children leave home. We will remember, instead, first birthdays, sporting events, adventures, prom pictures, the awful night when we took an infant who could not breathe to the children’s hospital, girlfriends, and graduations. Yet, how we approach the necessary and the routine, how we solve the little problems and select the face we bring to these tasks, will make us as parents and constitute who we are to our children. Wilder’s “This:” makes us feel our awkwardness, our stress, our resignation, and our resentment—and the truth that most of how we will matter lies in these now remarked yet unremarkable moments. The stakes, as Wilder makes plain in “Mother-Fear,” could not be higher:
Two small boots lost on a tennis court—
expensive ones, left in the rain.
• • •
Part 5 avidly leaps from the concrete to the metaphysical via poems whose contemplative endings open doors to the most necessary of questions: What is this for? Why am I here? Who am I when I step outside the lines that define the game?
“Mud Season,” set in winter, inks the art of attending as a set of instructions to self:
There are pebbles in my shoe
Place one gently between
tongue and cheek
The wordplay in these simple lines is delicious. Shall we read this self-guidance as “tongue in cheek”? The insertion of “gently” between “one” and “between” suggests not, but then again, how can we not be aware of the possibility—much as we are called to hear Catch in the poem title “Chalk and Release”? In these moments, we learn some precious things about the poet: her ear’s fine tuning to sound and substitution, her irrepressible sense of play, and a lightness born of her excursions into dark waters.
Convention has us read humor as parasitic, and Wilder’s poems consistently display an amused mind harvesting means of playful expression hitherto latent in the language. But humor also is effervescent, the expression of compression released. Wilder’s wit mousseux, cork popped, bubbles up from beneath. Its source is why, while enjoying the bubbles’ tickle, we are willing to brave with her the prudent necessities of wintering:
Sink into the river, tilt your head
and breathe through reeds . . .
Imagine your thoughts rising . . .
Signal to me when
it’s time
And then there is the leap to “Blink,” a near perfect poem, which portrays the compass of a thirty-year marriage as the space inside the flicker of an eye and then renders, with quiet approaching whist, domestic scenes that pare the journey to its essence:
We walked past homes and cars . . .
We lost some things . . .
We sat on the beach and tried to keep
the umbrellas wedged in the sand . . .
We hardly spoke.
“Blink,” as the only “we” poem in the bunch, stands distinct. A poignant articulation of what has been shared and of consummate intimacy never reached, “Blink” tenderly vivifies the loss-infused interior, ritual, and progress of this nearly conjoined life:
. . . The trails
we used to take became
too slippery to risk.
And this brings us, in the end, to the certain knowledge of why it was not enough:
Thirty years of fingertips
poised inches from
each other’s . . .
This poem’s placement in the text is exquisite. Having catalogued her narrator’s internal struggles, recollections of formative moments, fragmented reckonings, dance moves, embraces, resentments, and disappointments, Wilder has set forth the knowledge and established the conditions that make necessary this intricate poem of lucid acceptance. It appears as a thunderbolt.
The poems that follow are denouement, gently examining how to find a path of exit from what we now must leave behind and inviting us to imagine who we might be when it is done.
I hand you a sweater that you
can unravel, some threads
taut, some loose.
I feel you tug.
(From “The Way Out”)
What are we
if not bound
to one another
. . . boxed in by
. . . the game?
(From “Hopscotch”)
Artists and writers often seek liminal space, and much of their work abides within its indeterminate scope, touching the edge, following its line, but not leaping into the ocean that awaits. Leap Thirty, issuing from and sensitively engaging with the transitional space that follows the end of marriage, captivates by bravely choosing not to reside there. Its poems—observational and imagined—query, reinterpret, examine, accept, and then simply let go, opening with mature wonder to that which lies beyond. This is beauty: simply expressed, layered and wise, imperfect, graceful. Can one ask for more from a first book of poems?
Marc Zegans is a California poet. His recent collections include The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020) and La Commedia Sotterranea: Swizzle Felt’s First Folio from the Typewriter Underground (Pelekinesis, 2019). Marc regularly contributes verse to immersive theater productions and is the author of many short films. He is also a longtime creative development advisor. You can learn more about his practice at mycreativedevelopment.com.