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Natalie Eilbert @ Vonesper Studios, 2018

Natalie Eilbert at Vonesper Studios 02.08.18

written by Danielle Susi

features photo by Vonesper Studios

Swan Feast by Natalie Eilbert

In the poetry collection Swan Feast Natalie Eilbert writes that “The Venus of Willendorf limped from a dirt ocean / in 1908 into the hands of one Dr. Josef Szombathy.” Josef Szombathy was one of the male archaeologists conducting the excavation where the small prehistoric sculpture of a nude woman with exaggerated features, what became known as the Venus of Willendorf, was “discovered.”

Upon reading Swan Feast for the first time the many questions phrased in the poems caught my attention. In the first poem in the book the speaker asks “I have my very own origin story would you like to hear it.” In a later poem Eilbert writes “men will pick at rock / until your gifts are found and named, but I don’t / want to hear it.” The speaker asks in “The Death and Life of the Venus City,” “Can I speak for the Venus,” and answers several lines down, “I will speak for her as I spoke / for myself.” In “Consider a Landscape” the speaker asks, “Who can speak of this world.” The second time I read Swan Feast I noticed that there were rarely any question marks following the many questions in the volume. That is when I realized, these aren’t questions.

In Swan Feast Eilbert is erudite without being dry. The themes are varied, interconnected, and overlapping. Certain references (to the Venus, the city, the lake) and entire phrases appear repeatedly throughout the poems, providing the collection with continuity, despite shifts in form and perspective. Even though these poems have depth, you can still easily witness the force of personal experience, the rush of imaginative language, coruscating from the pages.

The poems are reference rich and have multiple layers of meaning, yet they remain open to the casual reader. An example is in the poem “Dr. Szombathy Receives Our Letter” when, during a sexual encounter V speaks mid thrust, saying “The death and life of great American cities is about negotiating influences and the impressions of citizens.” (This is not the first time this phrase appears in Swan Feast). We can infer a metaphor, as if it were that simple, when the speaker says “Strangers enter me / and I respond with silence, but V she’s an anti-city / no man can enter her.”

I have never read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, but despite my ignorance of the context of this reference V’s words still resonate. The reference probably works on other, perhaps more robust levels, if you are familiar with Jacob’s book, but you don’t have to have read it to appreciate the weight of V’s words.

Trying to track what a work of poetry means is always a fraught endeavor but this is especially true with Swan Feast because of its sheer density. Swan Feast is a difficult book to write about, until you realize that even if you interpret some things incorrectly, no one is ever going to interpret the book one hundred percent correctly anyway. The attributes that makes these poems challenging are the same attributes that make these poems strong; there is so much to miss, even after many readings.

There are four poems titled “Epithalamium” in Swan Feast. In the second one the speaker says “What good is a lake if a boy doesn’t / drown swimming to a girl on the other side.” In the first one, the speaker says “what lake would have us now.” In fourth one the speaker says, “Too often the poem tells us to find a lake.” In the third one a lake is not mentioned at all. I had to look up the word epithalamium. It means a song or poem celebrating a marriage.

The deeper I dig, the more I uncover. Even though with every reading of these poems I excavate more I will never reach a sufficient depth to extract the stone wife from the dirt and feel her figure in my hands. Despite how much I unearth, these poems remain in some way unknowable. Part of what makes a masterpiece a masterpiece is that it instantly welcomes you in but no matter how long you choose to visit with it, it will never be fully understood.

When reading Swan Feast I “discovered” the elusive lake the poems never told me to find. It was not in an epithalamium poem but in the poem “With Dead Brother in the Venus Landscape,” where Eilbert writes “An act / was done to my brother at the edge of a lake: blow air / through a reed long enough and he will go to you, believing.” The magic here is that even though we don’t know exactly what Eilbert means, we still know what she means.

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