By Bonnie Proudfoot

The initial poem of Deni Naffziger’s second full-length collection of poetry, Strange Bodies, can be seen as an introductory prelude. In it, readers sense a larger project, a way of making meaning that raises profound questions yet refrains from overstatement. “How fortunate for a leaf,” Naffziger writes, “to drop like wisdom/ from the arm of its mother/ to land without foresight or fear having lived only / ever /in the present.” Deftly, the poem moves from leaf to self, from self to consciousness, introducing ideas of wisdom, inheritance, time, awareness, choice, consequences. “How I am learning / that knowing is not real knowing /nor ignorance either / How choosing is a choice I’d rather not make sometimes / How not choosing/ is a choice I don’t know I’m making / How like the leaf I often land/ without intention/ but not without consequence.”

Strange Bodies is a book that gives poetic voice to the act of seeking, exploring what the mind and the self can intuit. Our “strange bodies,” paradoxically, may be (in part) unknown even to ourselves, but they also may be the only way we are able to access awareness. In much the same way that the science of physics broadens out from finite laws to theoretical questions engaging with infinite potential, this rich collection of poetry asks questions that seem at times essential, at times mysterious, and at times Socratic and philosophical invitations to the reader, always an acknowledgement that the questions are important.

The title poem, placed first in the first section, presents this paradox. “What is permitted by nature, or evolutionary biology, / or perhaps by God, are two slight openings/ with which to see everything.” The poet continues this theme, in “Alias,” mentioning that even when looking back at her younger self, “She knew her eyes / were the only place in her body where light refracted. / The rest of her remained in darkness.”

As humans, too often we seek comfort, equilibrium, we may turn to science, religion, the given wisdom of our parents or traditions to present us with predictable answers. These may not satisfy, and they may not suffice. “Sometimes you are afraid of what you do not know,” Naffziger acknowledges in second section of the title poem, although this does not stop her from confronting this realm. In “Druthers,” Naffziger writes, “I prefer physics to biology, and quarks to protons, illusive, ethereal clouds of energy / that cannot be measured / like waves of love or grief. / Which is not to say they don’t exist.”  

This is echoed in the closing section of “Little Birds,” a poem that begins with her mother’s loss of a “preterm infant” and moves, in the second section to a parallel occurrence for her grown daughter. At first a daughter, then mother, she looks through time to how awareness of the fragility of motherhood began to first awaken in her own consciousness. Naffziger shifts her own point of view. “I look for clarity,/ /for meaning and reassurance, / interpretation (a bit of history, even) / in the dictionary. All the words are there / or most of the ones I might ever use. Still, / a zebrafish will never know what it’s like to be a monkey.” Drawing on an image of the poet’s visit as a child to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the poem undermines any sense of ease, “And what about those babies in jars . . / all lined up on a shelf,/ nine jars, one for each month, to illustrate / the development of an embryo? / Where did they come from, / and who decided to put them in jars, / to display them at a museum for young / visitors to study? Even as a child, / I wondered where were their mothers.”

In a prose poem found toward the end of the first section, “At the Gallery – House on Crescent” Naffziger uses an ekphrastic approach, using poetry to discuss art, which really becomes another way to discuss poetry. In this case, she gives the artist the final words, “Question: Why does the sun consist of 3 spheres, each within the another?”   [Answer] . . . “Most of us never question [that] the sun will continually rise and set and rise again. Each sun within a sun represents a different stage of life, just as the 3 black circles outlining each one represents its finite nature. The artist wanted to believe in constants, but it is obvious she knew better.”

Intimate and lyrical, using narrative as a springboard but not as an end, the poems in Strange Bodies can be seen, as Seamus Heaney writes in The Government of the Tongue, not to define constants, but “with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit.”

In the final section of the book, a section entitled “Still Life,” (which is accompanied by stunning and meditative photographs by the poet’s husband, the award-winning photographer Mark Hackworth), Naffziger brings this into full realization.

“Is it safe to put a pond in a poem? /How about a heron at the shoreline, its leg lifted/ like a mime over unsuspecting carp? Is it safe to slip a snail in a pond in a poem, spilling over with algae? What about a promise? Will it float like hope? Will it glimmer and flash and arouse curiosity or worse? . . . I wonder what a memory would do. /If I tossed it like a stone, would it skip, sink, or swim? Would it drown or dwarf or morph into something more or less / like love, like loss, like regret? . . .  And you will ask yourself: How does that kind of consciousness work?”

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Bonnie Proudfoot‘s novel, Goshen Road (Swallow Press, 2020) was selected WCONA’s Book of the Year and long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway. Her poetry chapbook, Household Gods, was published in 2022 by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.