The Mercury Press, 2005
Read by T.K. Murphy
In Only This Blue, Betsy Warland demonstrates her exceptional ability to undermine linguistic hegemonies without being demanding or showy. Like many long poems, Only This Blue requests we examine a vocabulary that develops reiterative and associative signification as the text evolves. By meditating upon colour, Warland delimits the ways in which standard associations intrude upon intensely personal moments — but by presenting these associations in fractured, hesitating, rhythmical verse, she creates, through imagistic, aural or visual pattern, new associations that are, in the end, independent of the intrusive red-stop yellow-slow symbolism that began the process.
A tentative colour dictionary might look like this:
RED: The colour of impossible definition. Exact, precise, lively, red is the colour of the dictionary, is the bright coat of an imaginary, “radiant” self, is the certitude of “stop!” It is blood; it is the immediate action of a tow truck. It translates poorly into black and white ultrasounds. It is the dream which ends in a lost breast.
BLUE is the colour of the detachment which characterizes linguistic acts. “Out of the blue” comes the word, previously unnoticed, hurtling “end over end / toward your forehead.” You raise your hands, waiting for impact, and instead a word-rock “cracks” a “windshield”; expecting injury, your safety is both disappointment and relief. In the face of blue “there is no outcome,” no action; just a crack.
YELLOW: the colour of hesitation (”yield / … do not cross over”), of signification proliferating without cognition (a list of all things yellow, and all things that sound, well, oh, just like it). Yellow breaks the astonishing certitude of red. It is the colour of opening (” — aperture of yellow — “), greeting (on a page, the lone word “Hello!”) and eroticism (”[come closer]“).
BLUE + YELLOW = GREEN. Green is described using other colours. It is inarticulate (”who could ever speak / green?”). Green flirts with the space between the soil’s obscuring darkness and the observant blue sky. Green is the knife held to the feminine. Green is the tentative permission to grow. Green is “change in the act of”: green is poetry.
While any such dictionary is perhaps contrary to the spirit of Warland’s endeavour, I present this one to demonstrate the precision and suggestiveness of her assembly. All round, a fine piece of craft.
