Marina Burana

Voice/Poems by Susan Azar Porterfield: what lies beyond

            Poems ‘from’ the Voice. Poems as Voice. Poems ‘made of’ Voice. Or even, ‘to Voice Poems.’ Or perhaps, very literally, ‘Voice’ subtly leaning on ‘Poems.’ The title of this book by Susan Azar Porterfield hints at a subtle riddle. Like the poems in it, there is a hidden world of possibilities subservient to the power we usually assign to words. A splendid narrative of a personal exploration that delves into a collective ontology.           

            The book opens with ‘Writing poems,’ where we read: ‘the road before you a blank paper sheet, / lacking line or lip, as if you were writing / in the emptied dark without being able to see.’ (Azar Porterfield, 2025:3), and we instantly set the pieces together: ‘voice,’ ‘poems,’ ‘writing,’ ‘line,’ ‘lip,’ ‘road,’ ‘paper,’ ‘emptied dark.’ There is, right from the start, a journey, both a physical journey and a venture into the realm of thought. There is, in a way, a platform laid upon us, bridging writing, the urgency of feeling and a poetic voice. And also, a soft nudge to what cannot be conquered, or understood, voicing our poems, as it is, in darkness. As if poetry were guiding us through a world of unknowability.

            Slowly, these poems emerge from a delicate dialogue between questions and answers. Yet, there are no definitive answers; and instead, the questions transform into an all-encompassing superstructure that unites and sustains everything within its bounds. And as we read each poem, we are not fully aware of this—lost in the beauty of their diction, in the perfect rhythm of their music. The barking of a dog echoes something else; premature death and illness open the door to more questions, leaving a sense of emptiness that cannot be filled; and language doesn’t seem to always work, ‘Make language your whore. / Clarity kills (…)’ (Azar Porterfield, 2025:9). Poems are voiced, but all endeavors to access some level of understanding of the self and the world as we know it fail to seep into the core.

            The second part of the book, however, reassures us, saying, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ It then leads us into a house, into rooms, into bodies, and into the physicality of existence—something we believe we can cope with. Yet, once again, there is an unsettling way of navigating reality. ‘the slow plow of body through waves of air, / and now, standing upright at last, she couldn’t / find the silly bathroom, which was not / where it was supposed to be.’ (Azar Porterfield, 2025:27). The house is erected as a metaphysical space where the rules of being apply, but where life is suddenly manifested in the intricacies of the questions that lie within the atoms constituting the things around us. ‘Waiting, in the half-dark of our house. In / the half-dark. Waiting, keys in hand. / Some people before me have waited here. / There will be others. I don’t know them.’ (Azar Porterfield, 2025:32). A bridge is built, again, between the physical world and the world of abstraction; a dialogic intersection hidden in the ‘mundane’. ‘The house next door stopped breathing, / and we’ve become unsure / of how our days keep time.’ (Azar Porterfield, 2025:33).

            We leave the house and we enter the universe of the soul and the self in the third part of the book. We inhabit laughter, we are buffeted from joke to joke for a while and we realize nothing is so terrible, after all. ‘Hold still, I’m trying to measure you / for posterity, Soul says. / Giggling, Self asks, Did you say posterior? / and bends over. / Soul can’t stop laughing: You’re such an ass! / They decide to try this again / when neither one is looking.’ (Azar Porterfield, 2025:52). The poems progress in a witty dance, with fast-paced dynamics that feels like a performance.

            The fourth part goes back to the questioning, the angst of not knowing, of the eternal search, and positions everything in different realities, seductively exploiting its lyricism in the material world: birds, floors, heat, windows, roads, the Tube. But now it all feels different. We are relaxed, flexible, our minds are more open and the book does its magic: it transforms the arbitrariness of language. It rewrites (re-voices?) the dusty corners, the neglected, the predictable, unsealing a space of gentle curiosity.    

            Throughout the entire book, we feel that our understanding is deliberately kept elusive. Although a strong sense of questioning persists, there is a deeper, almost primal impulse to never get to any kind of truth, leaving us in an enduring aura of mystery that draws on the limitations of knowledge and the nature of the unknowable.

            This is a marvelous, brilliant, and exquisitely crafted book of poetry. A work in which, at every turn, something lies beyond. ‘All poetry is about death,’ reveals Azar Porterfield at the very end. And as I finish reading, I feel as though I have witnessed many deaths within its pages—death followed by rebirth; a cycle of knowing and unknowing that transcends language and self.

            I now believe that poems, ultimately, are voiced for survival. Or perhaps our convoluted humanness simply looks for a place to lean on and rest. A poetic adjacency that needs to be voiced.