Of Love and Drowning

Antony Christie’s selected poetry collection, Of Love and Drowning, bundles work from 1985 until the present into notions of permanency and residual hauntings. At the forefront of the collection is a revamped Adam and Eve who encroach on poems while distancing themselves from a modern world replete with both physical and emotional dilapidation. From parental illness to relationship woes, both romantic and familial, these poems are hinged to traditional themes played out by Christie’s couple, in city gardens, palliative care, and summer cottages.

Each section encompasses the sort of flotsam that clutters our daily interactions as well as our more meditative moments. By sloughing and remaindering physical objects, this collection prevents its own slippage into too intimate memories within a relationship we, as readers, are never fully privy too. In such a candid culture as this, these omissions are at times refreshing for the real poetry here is in the objects, the negative space around the unnamed couple. By exploring memory through tropes of growth and decay, Christie moves amongst imagery where “there are gardens and half built walls/though they have dangers of their own”(56). In this sense, these poems travel through vestiges of time where people, old dogs, and photographs may appear, disappear, and return as cautionary examples of how near the past is in each of our lives.

Christie’s couple experience a cyclic relationship throughout the collection, where one may “pick a green grey sturmer from a low branch, /polish it on your jeans jacket, /smile as you fold my hand around the firm flesh, /tell me to bite”(22) while in another instance they “look at each other with teeth, / draw in our blankets/like the ghosts of old nations”(63). The mercurial quality of their relationship encourages the physical wandering through wrecked masonry and upheaval that haunts their space. In “Living in the Earthquake Zone,” the house is sturdy but still symbolic of colossal architecture that threatens, through its existence, to overtake its inhabitants. It is their vulnerability that Christie explores: “the house is stone and mortar—/no compromise here—/the beams of squared pine/would snap a spine” (12). This is perhaps the crux of the collection: what may protect and shelter can also damage.

On the other side of the decay and ruin is the promise of reparations regardless of time’s rigid persistence. Though the lover proudly points to “the silver chain/I mended with a paper clip/to hold/until morning”(41), there is the unspoken failure as humans to prevent erosion where children have “certainly aged”(44). In this, there is an inherent simplicity found in a kitchen filled with spring light with toast and honey set on “the oilcloth clean”(45). These explorations gravitate toward a more Zen-like perception in that it is the moment itself worth noting. This at times makes some poems too quiet and subtle but with patience, the poem may illuminate itself in the simplicity of task, in particular, domestic task. This is where Adam might say to Eve: “put on your clothes/and we’ll have a beer”(46). —Tammy Armstrong