Sandy Florian. 32 Pedals & 47 Stops. Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007.

Review by Heather Green

Any discussion of what a prose poem can do would be enhanced by a reading of Sandy Florian’s enviably smart work. Her new chapbook, 32 Pedals & 47 Stops, a beautiful object in itself, particularly the handbound edition with a woodblock print depicting an organ keyboard, reads more like a full-length book with its satisfying pages of paragraphs and fragments. After hearing Florian read a few of these poems, I thought it was the musicality of her sentences, her ear for meter that guides the reader through her tortuous logics, making their destinations feel surprising and inevitable at the same time. After reading through 32 Pedals & 47 Stops a few times, I realized that this was just the jumping off point. Each poem in the sequence depicts a scene or a “moment” in full paragraphs, then finishes with an (often) alliterative mini-poem at the end that sort of sings or cries out or laughs for the scene. Somehow these endings both amplify the impact of the poems while diffusing their logic.

Florian is a collage artist, referencing artists and writers from Arbus and Hemingway to Handel and Shakepeare. In this way, she covers so much territory in a short book: a consideration of the signs that surround us, quite literally, such as the “English Only Spoken” in the first poem, the “distortion lens” through which a person must see another, and constant the presence of “The Moment,” which exists in this book as a sometime ghostly sometime corporeal presence in each scene. It seems wonderfully appropriate to use an image from an iconic photograph for the opening poem of a book with the epigraph, from Faulkner, “Only when time stops does time come to life.”

Likewise, a redux of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” equally suits the project, as Florian’s lovely, spare line treats the story well, and somehow manages to be rather funny and spooky at the same time:

To The Moment, the American and the girl are merely interchangeable characters of the same short story. To the American and the girl, The Moment is a waitress whistling a ditty in the shadow.

In this way, the portrayal of characters moves effortlessly back and forth between the iconic and the particular, always mirroring two characters against one another to different effect.

Florian’s sentences becomes progressively more dizzying and evocative as the book progresses, the details accrue, and the poems, the moments begin to web together in unexpected ways. As a reader, you don’t know what she’s going to say next, but you begin to trust that it will reveal more territory on a complex map of rooms, streets, and dioramic scenes, the whole of which, viewed from a distance, appears to be two people regarding one another, mirror-like. In several scenes, twins look at one another, and in one poem it is mentioned that for twins, “To each, the other seems a consecrated comet, replete with heliotrope halo, two diamond strengths, and one natural orbit.” In another poem, a man stands in a bathroom with a mirror behind him and in front of him. He is reflected endlessly in the mirrors, and imagines a woman regards him from the tub: “To the woman, The Man is frank infinity.” These sometimes clausterphobic encounters with the self or others repeat and repeat, gaining a kind of nauseous momentum over the pages.

The intellectual rigors of this book, the way the poems connect together through recurring characters or bits of dialogue and the presence of “The Moment,” which acts sometimes as a scribe, other times a catalyst, are constantly offset by the mysterious envoys at the end of the sections, like this one, after the end of a scene in which a pair of twins visit a cemetery:

Hence, when The Moment declares, “Make a wish,” the two twins look at

one another and declare the other lighter.

You are the Lighter than Air.

You are the Lighter than Sound.

You are the Sound of All Suns.

The Songs of all Sins.

You are my Silver-Lined Desiderata.

The final lines of the last poem in the book, following one of the wedding scenes:

Love is not love

Love is not love

on one hand evoke the next phrase, “which alters when it alteration finds,” from the Shakespeare sonnet so often read at weddings, which speaks to the recognition and acceptance of the other. But the lines, separated from that second phrase as they are and repeated, present a logical conundrum that can only be solved by assuming that the first love in each line has a different definition or connotation from the second. Here, it seems Florian evokes the deep lexicography of her book Telescope, with its intuitive, anecdotal definitions that function as surreal Venn diagrams of a word’s history and territory. These final lines also close the book on a note of doubt, fittingly, as doubt is as much of a presence in the book as is The Moment: self-doubt, the possibility of falling down, doubt in the recognition of self in the other, and the companionable doubt that trails us through rites of passage, such as the wedding that evolves as a train ride seen in glimpses throughout the kaleidoscopically engaging collection.