Anne Harding Woodworth on Annette Sisson

Winter Sharp with Apples, by Annette Sisson, Terrapin Books, 2024.

Winter Sharp with Apples opens with two quotes. The first is from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in which he claims to hold within himself the pleasures of heaven and the pains of hell. It is no wonder, then, that Annette Sisson writes of pleasure and pain, folding these emotions into superb lyrical poetry, that might at times be called “nature poetry.” But she doesn’t stop there.

The second quote, as this book unfolds, is from Daniel Stone’s “The Food Explorer,” in which the author praises early farmers’ ability to “bypass the sexual dance” in producing apple trees, not by using seeds but by practicing the art of grafting.

Sisson’s poetry studies pains, pleasures, and the complexities of continuity. Yes, she is extremely observant of nature and the details of nature, but also through nature she studies the psyche and emotions of the human experience, as in these lines from “Under a White Moon”:

                                             a bud
on a small bramble, petals drawn
tight as a pill bug—she remembers
the dusty corners of the wire enclosure,
sees her mother’s hands grafting roses . . .

Sisson uses unusual juxtapositions of words and thoughts. In her poem “Nature Almost Holds Us,” she combines liquids in watery word-streams of lovely combinations, as in “a storm of amniotic fluid.”

In “An Ecology of Shells,” which is an effective juxtaposition of sea and land, Sisson writes of her mother, who

lived in landlocked states,
leery of oceans, barely a swimmer.
Yet her bathroom was heaped with shells,
some purchased at home décor
stores, others bestowed by friends.

But there is no drought in the language of Sisson poems. The scourge of cancer figures notably in them. In “Muscle Memory,” the poet remembers being a child of eight, when she heard the “late-night train,” which metaphorically ushered in the diagnosis of her mother’s “first cancer” and the child observed “the grim jaws of muted / grown-ups.”

The mother’s cancer continues to stalk her. This is consummate pain within the poetry. In “Threadbare” the poet observes, “my mother’s // second cancer shrouds / the windowpanes of my room.”

But all is not pain. The pleasures within this poetry are many and often have to do with birds. In “Memo to a Fledgling,” for instance, the poet tells a young bird what to watch out for, ending with:

Choose the slouching sunflower other birds spurn.
Examine each seed before piping it down
the black gullet of your dreams. Let it feed
the skylark in you, silver song like rain.

Still, into pleasure Sisson sometimes mixes a hint of pain, as in the poem “Our Hands.” She is speaking to someone who has died, most likely her mother. “Three months after you die . . . / a grandchild will be born.” The beauty of this painful and pleasurable poem continues into the amalgamation of generations into one: infant, mother, grandmother.

With fingertips that once grazed your cheek,
I will touch this baby—and he will be yours.
I will cradle him in our hands, picture
how you would swaddle his body, lose myself
in your strokes. Hunched to my chest, he will drift
to the sound of your blood sluicing. . . .

The poet’s relationship with her mother is complex. In the poem “Late,” for thirty years the mother has thought erroneously that her daughter had undergone an abortion. Learning that she had not,

She releases the fusty air
from her chest, lays down
the wraith of raw belief
she’s carried like a blade.

The daughter has been grafted to her mother and like all plants cleft-grafted, the new product can be often other than the old one. Still, the old one nourishes the new and the new receives gladly from the old and flourishes. Perhaps this is best said in the title of the second section of the book, “Limbs Propagate in the Split,” an evocative line from the poem “Blue Spruce.”

A sombre autumn, season of drought
and divorce. I read about cleft-grafting,
wonder how limbs propagate in the split.

Sisson herself flourishes. She plants seeds, waters them, grafts, and observes. Knowing the metaphorical significance of plants and trees, and of the creatures that populate earth, sky, and sea, she chronicles her own experiences. Her poetry is filled with snake, turtle, mourning dove (remember the u), bluejay, cardinal, sparrow, katydid, cricket, and even octopus. Outside of nature, there is the Dodge Dart, Ukraine, marital discord, Florence Nightingale, suicide, and a fan, to name a few of the myriad subjects Sisson pursues. In her fan poem, “Unfolding,” the fan becomes something organic, as if it is a part of nature. The fan “accordioned like her [daughter’s] life / in Madrid,” and the spacing of this poem on the page almost lets the breeze in to cool the reader, as the poet herself learns how to use a fan, a technique shown by the daughter who

snaps hers open

                   demonstrates how to stir
the sultry afternoon
shuffle heat
froth it        like meringue
how to conjure breath

If any poem represents the collection’s title, Winter Sharp with Apples, it is “Caney Fork,” as the poet takes the reader along the river. It is pure apple: the “tang of applesauce,” apple tart, an orchard, bushel baskets. And the apple woman. Like all the poems in this book, “Caney Fork” tells a story beyond apples, a thoughtful story that allures and surprises in exquisite poetry.