“The History of Words is Not The History of Sound”: A Review of After June by Charity Gingerich
Andrew Rihn
Charity Gingerich's debut collection of poetry is a case study in rhythms. The poems are filled to bursting with landscapes and choral hymns, while the poet's own internal rhythms pulse and hum just below the surface. The tension between these interior and exterior worlds, and the struggle to keep their rhythms in sync, form the emotional core of After June.
Gingerich’s poems often begin in the landscapes of the garden (as they did for Dickinson), with an observation: “tiny melons sweat,/ sweet moons under the sun./ I want to be still like that again,” she writes. The landscapes reflect the annual parade of changes, unified in an unobtrusive way by the passing of the seasons. The human heart, too, is a landscape, and the pastorals of After June beat with its rhythm. Gingerich is at her best when the earth around her is experienced as emotion, a quiet act of communion and subtlety alongside the wisteria and mountain laurel and “the quilted ache of longing that is each burst of daffodils.”
If the poems in After June sometimes express hesitation, or speak provisionally, this is not to say that the poems themselves are tentative. Instead, they eschew declaration and embrace the exploratory. “The artist's brushstroke/ pausing between intention and desire,” she observes in one poem. “I've been obsessed with love stories not my own,” she confesses in another.
When Gingerich does speak of certainty, it is often when she speaks of music: “Even now, when I am sure of little else, I am sure of harmony.” Here again the poet grasps the essential vitality of the physical world. She finds a spiritual connection through the earthly experience, rather than a separation. For Gingerich, the struggles of a fallen world are beautiful, too–the longing, the loss, the sense of complete incompleteness. Poems like “Conflict is the Only Way to Intimacy” demonstrate that perhaps our frustrations are actually beautiful even as they vex us.
In the midst of loss or tragedy, we can still celebrate our ability to grieve, and praise our capacity to feel—even when this feeling is a hardship. “We are all of us dying from one sorrow or another. // I've sung all the hymns as proof,” Gingerich writes in another poem. The poet looks at art, as well as nature, as opportunities to pivot when we need to turn away, and, paradoxically, as markers for the trail when we need to return. In places such as the “Rhodes Art Gallery” or the “graveyard of the Sisters of Lorretto, KY,” Gingerich looks at Vermeer's “The Music Lesson” and sees “some focal point I'm only vaguely aware of but doggedly follow.” In the graveyard, the speaker promises “to never sit on a bench away from the sunset.”
Close relationships with women are constant in After June. With her mother, a speaker collects white sand from a beach “as if to remind ourselves that the small, dry bodies of dead creatures make beauty, too.” There is a sister speaking in a “German dialect.” And there is a grandmother, who “stitched/ the most-heartbreaking quilts.” Gingerich catalogues these relationships throughout the book, summarizing their importance early in the collection: “I found my own voice by blending in // with the women around me.”
Poetry has natural relatives in both prayer and meditation. Gingerich's words could earn any of those designations: poetry, prayer, mediation. They recognize their conflicts but long for peace. Rich in observation and distinct in experience, the poems in After June show us that loss is, among other things, a reminder of what we had, and that longing can be a prelude to dreams made manifest.
Andrew Rihn is the author of Revelation: An Apocalypse in Fifty-Eight Fights, a book of prose poems about Mike Tyson. He also writes a monthly column, The Pugilist, for Into the Void magazine. He lives in Canton, OH.