Longing Distance
by Sarah Hannah

Home Planet News, Issue 54, Spring 2006

Longing Distance, Sarah Hannah, Tupelo Press 2004, $16.95 pb

Review by Lorna Knowles Blake

The title of Sarah Hannah's first collection, Longing Distance, is immediately intriguing. The vernacular "long distance"—I think telephone calls or travel—would be trite and obvious, but the deceptively simple conversion to participle transforms the adjectival meaning of "long" and changes our perspective entirely. The pun embedded in the title plunges the reader beyond the temporal into a world where space and time are experienced through a lens of passion, yearning and loss—of longing. In this transformed realm, distance is affected by longing (things seem closer or farther out of reach depending on desire), just as longing is affected by distance (closeness or remoteness can inflame or tamp desire).

Even so, the poems in this book do travel long distances: in subject matter (star-nosed moles, comets, art, myth), place (the city, the suburbs, the ancient world, the natural world), emotions (past and present loves, divorce, the longing for family and children) and poetic forms (sonnets, villanelles, syllabics). This armchair travel is enhanced by a bibliophile's pleasure in the book itself, which bears the Tupelo Press trademark of presenting powerful poetry in a beautiful package, and by the fact that we are firmly in the hands of such a moving, perceptive, intelligent and witty guide.

Delight in language is evident throughout her poems, but particularly in "The Colors Are Off This Season" and "You Furze, Me Gorse" with its explanatory epigraph (the only true synonyms, according to Tennyson, in the English language). Hannah's lexicon may not be her only companion, as Emily Dickinson wrote, but it is indeed her steadfast friend: no mere "scar" where a "cicatrix" will do and why settle for "leaping" or "jumping" when "salutatory" is an option? Hannah is a poet who enjoys wit and verbal play; she is unafraid to mix the contemporary and colloquial with deliberate archaisms and Latinate words when it suits her purpose.

Sarah Hannah is not afraid to expose the vulnerable underbelly of desire, the longing to close the distance her poems lay bare. A linen closet, two tall bookcases, the city market—each of these becomes an agent of action that pulls the reader into a moment, or outward, evoking distant echoes: so that fish in a city market in "greens and ices swimming" recall the "river lined with briar", a square of snow on a fencepost implies "the route the mountain sees," or the less than satisfactory bookcases in a current rental invoke the built-ins and carpeted library of a lost home—a room that persists in memory in the form of book titles repeated "like incantations through the years." For Hannah, the past is a "space between grasses, a channel in the loam," a place to search, and scan like the watchman (in the poem of the same title), alone in his lighthouse waiting for love's return with his eye on the distance because "it is his nature to fixate," and because he is, like the poet, a "creature of hope."

In Longing Distance, the world and its inhabitants are meticulously observed: in the collection's opening poem "Eclipse," Hannah writes "Every so often I am dilated; the pupils/ swallow everything—a catchall soup,/ two cauldrons, stubborn in the in the bald glare/ of bathroom light." This shows the poet's compulsion to bear witness, but the collection's final poem urges us to move beyond witness to gratitude and praise: "there might be fog someday/ (They will be lost), there might be fog/ And even squall, and you'll have nothing/ But remembrance, and you will have to learn/ to be grateful"—as we should all be grateful for this moving and compellingly beautiful book.