Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry
UNMET, by stephanie roberts (Biblioasis, 2025)
The Ocean in the Next Room, by Sarah V. Schweig (Milkweed Editions, 2025)
BY LISA RUSS SPAAR
Something Alan Jacobs points out in a review of Martin Woessner’s Terrence Malick and the Examined Life has helped me to articulate the particular power of two intensely self-reflective second collections of poetry, UNMET by stephanie roberts and The Ocean in the Next Room by Sarah V. Schweig. Jacobs writes,
For Malick, the essential work that a movie achieves does not happen in the theater as we watch; it begins when we leave the theater and return to our social and personal worlds. . . . Malick’s movies, like most of the best movies, are inducements to self-examination; they depict that experience in wonderfully and agonizingly detailed ways, and they passionately encourage us to the same kinds of reflection that the characters undergo.
For days, weeks, after reading each of these new books, I found myself feeling changed, altered by emerging from their dark and provocative interiors. Both books were, to quote Jacobs, “inducements to self-examination.” Why?
One reason: while both roberts and Schweig share profound worry, disappointment, and outrage at a range of social and cultural ills and injustices (climate change-induced chaos, gun violence, racism, and the fallout of global health crises), neither resorts to one-dimensional stances of blame or culpability. These books confront failure and mistakes with a bold forthrightness and with a generative, razor-wire, and sometimes disruptive care. As the speakers grapple with what it means to attempt to live a meaningful, even courageous life—and sometimes succeed and sometimes fall short of doing so—the poems are as full of questions as they are of possible answers. As roberts herself puts it in an interview for roommagazine,
I think, in my writing, I seldom seek to explicitly examine particulars, whether abstracts like intimacy or the all-too concrete of police brutality, as much as I am curious about the expanse of my perplexity. I see reverence and doubt not as ends of a seesaw but more like spaces on a coil that rotates in continuum. While the speaker of the poems experiences disappointment in other people there is also disappointment in the self.
stephanie roberts was born in Panama, spent much of her childhood in the United States (Brooklyn), and has lived most of her life in Quebec, Canada. She is a citizen of all three countries. roberts’s first full-length collection, rushes from the river disappointment was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2020 (a pamphlet, The Melting Potential of Fire, was self-published in 2012). She has been a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, and the recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence and a Canada Council of the Arts grant.
In a 2020 interview with Rob McLennan, what roberts says about the poet Steve Scafidi could well describe her own work as well:
I relate to the ambition of [Scafidi’s] work which somehow manages a polygamist marriage of heart-breaking tenderness, the erotic, anger, and humour while tangling (or untangling) intimate relationship, and politics.
UNMET—tensile and vulnerable at once—offers likewise “a polygamist marriage,” a nexus of eros, ire, humor, and conflicting political and personal emotions, often all in the same poem. In “Fetter,” for example, roberts writes, “If there were a trigger to explode in the face of pain, I would pull it.” Yet even as “repulsed” as she is “by gun violence, punishment corporal and capital, the imprisonment / of addicts and every filed tooth of power that proves us more fear than love,” she also acknowledges how the “economies” of power and risk can be quite different in reciprocal and intimate erotic play. “This is not why I ask you to secure me to the headboard,” she writes. In this private experience, she asserts, there is “no shame, hemmed body / trust not pain.”
Threaded among the poems that confront police brutality, racism, ecological imperilment (“Late May, Nova Scotia / tears into flames. Our new normal / we are told”), betrayal, and domestic violence are love poems, especially in a series of “unmet” poems (four poems are titled “Unmet, one poem is titled “Unmet : Again,” and one, the last poem in the collection, is a haiku called “The Unmet”). In fact, the collection begins and ends with haiku, lending the collection as a whole the whiff of a haibun, a journey. These “unmet” poems treat, in various ways, the push and pull of separateness in intimate relationships. The lovers in these poems refuse to sugarcoat various obstacles—different points of view, different domiciles, different needs. Instead, the poems are frank, antic, often funny. And while the desires are real, they often go “unmet” because of timing, physical distance, temporary discord. Nonetheless, at every turn there is a wish to live and love authentically, courageously, despite the terrifying vulnerability that can accompany erotic desire, especially if one has been hurt in the past. It is worth mentioning that roberts dedicated her first book to “the Unmet,” making this second collection part of an ongoing sojourn. The tone in this second book’s “unmet” series ranges from playful:
she dips french fries
in mayonnaise
he suppresses a gag
if we were married
i’d divorce you
and remarry you
so I could divorce you
to wryly oneiric:
. . . we will remember spring 2020
with all our suffering.
I had another dream that I was
the confidante of Beyoncé. I woke
under the ocean of it barely saving
myself. Espresso, pinky-tip of honey
& wanting you beside me.
I was going to get at those taxes
to violate a fine day with drudgery,
but scratch true blue & bird-of-paradise
black. I woke to the picture of you, my lighthouse,
apple tree, ladder, smiling, a radiance like
answered prayer. Shine
in your remote location safe from mask & glove.
My father died yesterday & how on brand,
taking leave in the midst of disaster. . . .
to forthrightly ardent. Here is “Unmet: Again” in its entirety:
wherever you’re going
i am going with you
say . . .
I’m afraid
say . . .
I’m a yam
i don’t want to go nowhere
through nothing
with nobody
say
desire wriggles in your bowels
mute tapeworm
munching
chalk, clay, charcoal
tell fear your dreams never
slept not by my hands
it is you who beat
your fist-sized muscle
half to death
—pulled it
over grates & grates
of regret
place newborn faith on a belly
of shared solitude
warm in the sure-coming
sunset
save all your yeses for me
roost yourself in this nest
put blood over the door of the past
inside
the future has eyes
only for you.
Yes, roberts tells us, the world is full of horror, of darknesses. How, she wonders in her inventive, soul-spinning syntax, can this existential murk yield light, abundance, if not through risk and vulnerability? In “Cross Words,” she writes that despite winter, fevers, and “mown loneliness,” what’s in her mind is a state of being in which there is “nothing at hand unrequited / there is no one unmet.” She closes the poem this way:
(knife your shine into me)
i’ve solved the cross
word of your hopes
i’m already thinking of you as darling.
One emerges from the agile linguistic theatrics of this book feeling requited, met, seen, and inspired—a sensation that moves from writer to reader. From daring to darling.
*
Sarah V. Schweig’s first book of poems, Take Nothing with You, appeared in 2016 from University of Iowa Press (Kuhl House Poets). She is also the author of a chapbook, S, brought out by Dancing Girl Press in 2011. Her second collection, The Ocean in the Next Room, winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, has just been published. Schweig’s individual poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Yale Review, Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere, and she is also a frequent reviewer and writer of essays, where her advanced studies in philosophy inform and are inextricable from her poetics.
In a brief essay in Ocean State Review, “A poem as a vehicle of thought: a note on ‘Poem On My Birthday,’” Schweig writes, “I want clarity of thought, I want beauty, but I do not want ease. I want challenge, struggle, and destabilization of all previous assumptions, but without chaos—like what happens when someone looks at a painting by Francis Bacon for the first time, or when someone encounters a new idea. . . . ‘When I think in language,’ Wittgenstein writes, ‘there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language itself is the vehicle of thought.’”
To call Schweig’s poems “stately” might undervalue the wild and wide-ranging reaches of their semantic grappling with clarity of thought, beauty, and “destabilization of all previous assumptions, but without chaos.” But there is a formal, perspicacious elegance to these poems of barely restrained despair and love. The collection is organized into three sections, each comprised of just four poems. To say that each of these poems is a heavy-hitter is not an understatement, and in this respect The Ocean in the Next Room evokes Elizabeth Bishop’s magisterial Geography Three, which contains only ten poems, every one of them—“In the Waiting Room,” “Crusoe in England,” “The Moose,” to name just three—iconic.
If there is a narrative arc to the book’s twelve often longer, meditative poems, it follows a young woman’s passage through various early employments, often in soulless office environments, as she navigates the vicissitudes of familial dynamics, romantic love, the birth of a child, and a move from a long lived-in city to a new town by the sea, and all of this in the years right before, during, and after the advent of the Covid pandemic.
“Goodbye, I said, my family, as I left them. / I worked for a company in a municipal building. / In a hole, with my belongings, I built a home,” she writes in the book’s opening poem, “Toward the Great Unity.” In this and other poems in Part 1, the speaker comes to question “what counts” and “what is valued” in a culture in which “Our Director, heir to the field attended an ivy. / From him we learned that to beget the industry / that creates more industries, some authority first hath / to beget the word beget.” (from “The Tower”). As the pandemic upends life in the Tower (“I held my hand up to the sun and saw light work / through it, and while we dismantled our lives, / the pristine blue the Director lorded over us was just / an effect of light cast on nothingness. I think / when he said industry he meant our obedience”), the speaker moves on with her life, eventually marrying a good person with whom she continues to seek meaning. “I am / skeptical of there being such a thing / as a self that one can just / lose,” she writes in “Poem on My Birthday”:
. . . The question isn’t
what exists? The question is what doesn’t
die with us? We light lights
in the dark. It’s a human thing.
In Part 2, the camera lens pans out a bit as the speaker addresses larger, systemic dysfunctions. In poems with titles like “Meanwhile in Our City of Abandon” and “Theory of Ash,” the poet confronts “policies of the city” in her “crumbling country”—policies about borders, power disputes, language. In the five-part elegy for America, “Five Skeins,” the speaker tells us:
. . . I am making an infinity scarf in my crumbling
country, trying to bring these nothing-theses together.
All true words mean approximation. I am trying to make
one united thing. . . .
Is this possible? The fifth section of the poem begins:
. . . I have been working
on the infinity scarf, losing heart.
the world splays itself out before me
and I spend my life scattering myself
across its coordinates, stretching
into a constellation so complex
it loses all shape, becomes merely discrete
points of faint light, forever separate.
Pin the edges together. . . .
Part 3 is anchored by two extraordinary poems, “Unaccompanied Human Voice,” a 31-part sonnet crown written during the pandemic, and “Waves,” an extended meditation on marriage, motherhood, privilege, and—as always with Schweig—the salvific failures and salvages of language. As is often the case with poems by poets like roberts and Schweig, I would, if I could, simply print both poems in full and sign off, with gratitude for the beauty, despair, and guarded hope each poem evinces.
“Unaccompanied Human Voice” is an aria of isolation, dread, responsibility, and love. Its title clearly shouts out to two Modernist poems of despair, the end of Eliot’s Prufrock (“human voices wake us, and we drown”) and, in its circularity (that infinity scarf, again), Yeats’s “widening gyre.” The first poem begins:
I’ve been walking in wider and wider circles.
So long since I’ve heard music, when I do I follow.
A fire escape’s machine transforms a street with bubbles.
Beneath a tree a small brass band rehearses cameos.
Evenings, fireflies contend with kids’ jars, breaking free
To bring darkness to the field, tiny lighthouses anchoring.
A thousand strangers ignite their phones, feeding on feeds.
If everything has meaning, nothing has meaning. . . .
As the speaker moves through the “dreadful” subtext of the pandemic, she wanders in recursive loops around issues of beauty and truth with regard to family, husband, friends, self. Of a friend whom she cannot anymore see in person, she writes,
I tell her I’m trying to live my contradictions,
my life a poem I keep trying to revise.
I tell her to watch King Lear on evil Amazon:
The weight of this sad time we must obey.
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
As the stasis of dread persists, seasons pass, little things change along her walk, and at one point the speaker notes that she’s “frequently self-deceived // in keeping this crown going, having nothing to say. / The weight of this sad time we must obey.” Not unlike Homer’s Penelope, Schweig’s crown—“the warp and weft / of the depressed weaving the days seamlessly together”—is a way of staving off, of saving self. In the crown’s last poem, Schweig acknowledges that there is “Nothing more fearful than being an animal, / subjected to the whims and winds of Nature.” The long sequence wraps up not with relief, gnosis, or epiphany, but rather with an appreciation for “the humiliation / of being a living thing.”
Schweig continues her meditations, her poetic argument, with beauty, morality, and paradox in the book’s ante-penultimate poem, “Waves.” In it, a speaker, her husband, and infant child are staying at “Waves Hotel and Spa,” where “[e]very other guest is British, burnt pink and smoking.” What does it mean to love a child? To need to write? To hold privilege and horror, tenderness and corruption, at once? “If it’s knowledge of the world that defeats us,” she writes, “I have no answer. I have only this inexplicable impulse / to cling to poetry.” In the collection’s last poem, “Longest Night,” we find our narrator at the winter solstice, confronting but not resolving the paradoxes that stalk the book: how to reconcile privilege with want? Life and death?
The feeling is: Nothing fits together.
Recipes and war and discount pianos
scroll in the feed with my memories,
and I still think of my young life
as being lived in the city I left.
Every locus now has its pockets
of unfathomable wealth. Even here
I walk by a house being built
and each day there’s a higher floor.
My child sleeps while others die. . . .
Though now, despite living out of the city and by the water in a beautiful place, “tents are everywhere.” Plenty and poverty. Meaning and insignificance. Schweig leaves us, characteristically, not with a speculation, but “the feeling being / can’t-catch-a-breath at the thought / of the question of where people / will go or what they will do.”
*
Both of these new second books resound with “expanses of perplexity” that invite the reader into their care and questioning. To return to Jacobs on Malick’s films, these poems “are inducements to self-examination; they depict that experience in wonderfully and agonizingly detailed ways, and they passionately encourage us to the same kinds of reflection that the characters undergo.” As I return to my “social and personal worlds” from the experience of engaging with these books, daring in their thought and language, their own self-reflective examinations, I feel urged to examine my own choices and ambivalence, my perplexity. I attend to their courageous searching.
