**On Close Red Water by Emma Aylor**

by Tyler Truman Julian

Those looking for the perfect autumn read need look no further than Close Red Water by Emma Aylor. The prize-winning collection deftly blends folk and ancestral wisdom with feminist spirituality, resulting in poems that engage with landscape, family legacy, and femininity in profound ways. As Close Red Water approaches its second birthday, the collection, with its benevolent ghosts and subtle witchcraft, deserves another look during Spooky Season. Close Red Water attempts to make sense of the haunting that is familial legacy and parse out what it means to become an individual surrounded by family ghosts. Some say that naming a ghost can take away its ability to haunt and Aylor’s collection successfully names ghosts in order to take away their power.
           “The place I know holds an ancient pang,” begins Close Red Water (“Hay Moon”). The lyrical pulse of the collection’s opening poem establishes a strong voice and image-driven poetry that reinforces the familial and landscape-based ties of this “ancient pang.” “Hay Moon” finishes on these two ideas to lead into the rest of the collection:

            It feels like leaving again the land I left already. Remember back
            at the farm, after picking up hay? My father asked me recently.
            How the air was so soft you could wrap it around you.
            What’s past arches at the roof of my mouth like salt. In an ocean
            I remember, the brown water, cold, unrolls cleanly, paper over me.

What does it mean for the past to be eaten up, but to also sit uneasily on one’s tongue like salt? To be held in “brown water,” but “cleanly”? There are paradoxes in Close Red Water that shed light on the muddiness of the past’s impact on the present. The past both hurts and holds in comfort, like being haunted by a familiar face. This reality is explored in “False Spring,” a poem that plays with space on the page, taking the shape of a river or a timeline, fluid but structured. Aylor writes:

            One day I’ll wake with ice on my tongue
                        and cold spread to the ceiling and it will settle
                        in narrow planks, each length lit to
            innermind blue. Blue of my grandmother’s eyes,
                        chicory through vapor, one not passed full
                        to my father, whose blue is rinsed by white.
            I have only ever been haunted
                        by people I didn’t know alive: flashes
                        at a room’s edges and twist of crashed
            ribbon in early morning. I take on ghosts
                        not yet ghost, old panes overlaid, future
                        visitants. My grandmother passed on the first
            day of spring—a hundred and half.
                        I left my office to stand by the river;
                        water ran brown and rained-into
            under the bridge. Her body lay south a good
                        few hundred miles. Trees stood slipped
                        leafless; crocuses started to push up.
            My grandmother would never haunt a person.
                        She would not want to be a bother.
                        I almost see her in the mirror
            passed down to my parents’ room, corroded
                        by rot, unsilvering for two centuries:
                        to look is to see her cheekbone and chin
            picked from mine and a face specked in glass
                        decay. The plane was made and brimmed
                        in walnut, a still pool painted dark behind—
            We intend a mirror to preserve the original light.

The collection explores what is passed down from generation to generation, with emphasis on the matriarchal line. “My brother can’t witch; he doesn’t have the eyes,” Aylor’s speaker reports in “Self-Portrait as Water Witcher. He doesn’t have “the eyes,” neither does the father referenced above in “False Spring,” the same father who asks if the speaker remembers how the hay could wrap a body up in “Hay Moon.”
The buildup of these images, such as blue eyes that carry mystical significance and are presented through a feminist lens, gives the speaker in Aylor’s work power and the ability to self-actualize outside the family unit. This power is made clear in the lyrical, imagist poem “Conservatory”:

           Holy bones of the greenhouse slim and steeple;
            holy few panes brushed by blue. Holy strung river
            run under monstera and pitcher plants that open

            their grace mouths. Holy mother who asks
           her daughter, so this beautiful thing is carnivorous?
            Holy my mother’s naming, her love for botany:

            even here her hands spindle in the ferns—
           wrinkled palms that braid drifts of my heart lines
            through. Holy air eighty degrees and humid

            in the fern house. Holy my déjà vu as water sings indoors
            and rock seems a place to lay myself down.
            Holy my tongue, slowing, enclosed.

            Holy for I have been and believed, my three names
            urns for family dead; holy the ants that wobble
            over my sclerae, ghostlets that stop now and then to eat;

            holy to be planted green in smooth water and shiver
            a body’s way to its given bed. I have been
            here before. Have not been here before.

Aylor’s speaker emphasizes her power: “Holy my tongue.” To speak and write are acts of power. Claiming that power and naming it holy reflects the feminist spiritualism of this collection, especially as it connects to nature and mysticism. When one develops as an individual outside the family, they are better positioned to re-enter the family in a healthy way and overcome past trauma. By exploring this dynamic through an image-driven feminist lens, Aylor brings her speaker full circle, asking,

How do I ask my family
to haunt me here?

None of the altars
I make living alone will reach

the three thousand miles
to their graves. In fairness,

            it is a long way to walk,
            and do I really believe?

            …

            How can I rightly feel deserted
            as the one who left a place behind? (“Haunts”)

There’s excitement and joy in the agency experienced by the speaker as she claims her identity, but there’s also a sense of loss. “I wish you’d lay, I wish you’d lay me down / fluffed or washed, spindled or carded,” she laments in “Our Lady of the Blue Ridge.” “This is not coming easy— / there are parts of you leaving—I’m misplacing accents / with the loss of home-tongue.” It’s hard work to assert one’s place in a family, to name ghosts, to say good-bye. Close Red Water acknowledges this reality.
In “Body Language,” Aylor’s speaker confides, “I only see what I can see, but I’ve made my work / to lead you down to that water with me.” A lot of work has been done to understand the water and the people in her family who lived, worked, and died along its riverbanks. A feminist examination of landscape and family, presented through lyrical, image-driven poetry makes Close Red Water an exciting and thought-provoking read. Its engagement with the supernatural adds nuance and depth to these themes, especially as the nights grow longer. Reading Close Red Water won’t leave you looking over your shoulder for things that go bump in the night; rather, you’ll be inspired to look back to your past at what ghosts need named and released in your own life.

In case you missed it—here are Aylor’s poems from The Shore:

Distance
Stonefruit Season
Daydream