Overland
Overland, Natalie Eilbert’s third collection, begins with the dedication “For those who could not survive.” The opening poem’s first line has stern words for the living: “It isn’t useful to celebrate being alive.” Those two sentences introduce several of Overland’s opposing forces: gendered and environmental violences and strategies for survival, communing with the dead and being poetically and politically “useful.” A single Eilbert stanza can span all the above, admitting into its porous surfaces everything from shameless yearning to unprettified fact: “I / want a god to glare and nod. I want a god to do anything at all // with my debts.” Connecting her disparate materials is a rare associational intelligence, its quickdraw neurons firing between sentences:
An Orbit gum pack on the sidewalk, I don’t know how empty.
Just sitting there like a manuscript draft. Whole generations
of poetry devoted to the pasture have ended in die-offs.
In these three lines, Eilbert chains together three forms of human making: first litter; then literature, brought down to the same low level; and finally unnumbered “die-offs,” the result of “Whole generations” of the manmade devastation our pastoral poetry carefully omits.
While writing Overland, Eilbert studied journalism and now works as a mental-health reporter. For this poet of long, lunging lines and “the lyric rush I am so good at,” traditional journalism can feel like an obstruction, the unsmiling public face of a society structured around silence and complicity:
[…] I am told descriptions
of weather do not belong in the news unless the news is about
weather. Journalists should not describe the sky when
reporting
on shootings.
But Overland wagers it all on our imperfect language, our last best hope for airing experiences so private or suppressed as to feel incommunicable. In “Crescent Moons,” a survivor shows the external signs of a sexual assault to a nurse: “Little crescent moons / where his nails stabbed into me.” The nurse responds without metaphor: “She gave me / the word abrasion so gently I offered consent.” Language as gift, recognition, unconditional care: this is one of many discoveries Overland perches on, before its perpetually moving thought heads restlessly on.
