Cynie Cory

AN ACHIEVEMENT OF TRAUMA WRITING

“April is the Cruelest,” the final poem in Mary Lou Buschi’s most recent collection of poems, BLUE PHYSICS, circles back to its first epigraph, “Blue”, a poem penned by the author, and the “The Ice Storm”, which headlines the opening section of BLUE PHYSICS. The second epigraph is a copy of a handwritten letter from John to Lucy dated 6/11/77 which sets the theme of loss and provides context for the reader. John’s name threads throughout the collection. He writes “…I truly believe we became close friends in Nov-Jan and I hope the same still exists. If this is true please call me at…” His closing salutation is “Love.”

“Blue” is instrumental in preparing the reader for the mystery within many of the poems in the collection, and for the complicated elegance of the poems themselves. Mary Lou Buschi is the real thing, and we are convinced as early as the epigraph, “Blue”. Buschi is a master of the poetic line. Each line has its own integrity, and it must be so. Buschi works with emotional subject matter that refuses sentimentality. Her work is invested in the precision of this emotionality better kept distanced from the speaker. She achieves remarkable authority of voice and tension through her chiseled craft and detailed attention to language.

“Blue” is not static. It’s first line is elegant, an equation. It describes the blue of the title, “in the way light bends—” with the authority. The diction is clear, quiet. The poet has immaculate control over the speed of its action of “bending”. It is an action that must be imagined by the reader. The action of imagining the action of Blue is suspended using both abstraction and the m dash at the end stop.  There is further slowing, using double spacing which increases the depth and length of white space and is further emphasized through a deep indentation of the second line, “Blood through skin”: The explanation of Blue bending. This is the beginning of a brilliant complication which paradoxically gives the reader clarity through the image of “Blood through the skin”. It is atypical for a poem to move with an abstraction, as does Rene Char, and build the movement through the poem with more abstraction. “Blue” is deliberately slow. It moves at the speed of blood through skin, which complicates the title as color, which we initially see as light bending –.

Blue is now Red – (through skin) and in a sense we must read (past tense “red” as a play on words) the skin as another movement of color – “skin” may falsely ground the reader because it is a noun that is tangible. But the line, “Blood through skin,” has its own integrity and its indentation emphasizes the image that end jambs. Our perspective, our sight, our senses are fooled – This is not stasis, nor is the poem necessarily at this point, about blood through skin – Yet we come to the capitalization of the next line “A circle within” which results in an ambiguity. This is a continuation of the line above and is it not – yet the end rhymes “skin” and “within” pull focus on the two lines, which are meant to be read closely as a continuation of the bending blue light, the blood through skin. We see the circle within which becomes “a lake”. The use of an M dash holds the reader to the image of the lake for an increased period. This noun grounds the reader as well as the poem. It is the precise place that the entire manuscript circles around.

This poem does so much work in only five brief lines.

“The lake” brings us back to blue – The most concrete moment in the poem – The reader is finally rewarded by the difficult work the poem demands of us: from the penultimate movement of the poem where the punctuation suspends us in time, to the left margin where our eye must travel inward to “How it moves.”

The poem begins with a movement and continues moving by bending to a circle in a lake –to finally understanding the way blue moves –

We could say the poem moves full circle but that would be to misunderstand “How it moves.” The final line is a full thought with a full end stop. It correlates to “Blood through skin” through its shared indentation and capitalization of the first word.

Blue moves precisely the way the poet indicates.  Color is perception and is also determined through wavelengths and frequency. Color is complicated. There is an aspect of color that is purely physical and objective. Yet the question of light and color begins to become metaphysical. Color is not a property of light. Frequency is a property of light. The Title of the work, “Blue Physics” is oddly irrational. Or intentional. The author is not to be underestimated. She knows that color goes beyond physics into the realm of metaphysics what is known as quale (pl. qualia), sound too.

The poet is a master craftsperson. Each poem in BLUE PHYSICS is exact. The poet is hyper aware of time without telegraphing this to her reader. Her themes are loss, death and what happens in between: childhood, innocence, the loss of innocence through sexual experience, experience. The sequencing of the poems and the section indicate a sharpening of time, an acuteness that the poet surrenders to because, well, she lives in time. Therefore, the poems move in time. They slow. They stop. The future is intercepted by the present and the past. The poet works in couplets. Couplets help organize time. They slow narration. They slow time. The poet tightly controls the line. She uses white space to slow, to listen, to reflect, to breathe. She uses long lines without stanzas. She breaks open poems like eggs and exposes the messy innerness of sexuality and experience. “Tangerine” is a prose poem with justified lines. She writes in the form of an Abcederian.

The experimentation with form is not born of restlessness it is an interrogation of the heart of truth, experience, -- it is born of content: Part I childhood, girlhood, loss of innocence, familial love, sexuality. Part II: Body Parts Missing. These are the losses. The poem “Gettysburg”, “Union of Heaven & Earth” is where the speaker has matured. Her identity is expressed in her journey through time. The mother’s death. The father’s death. The natural disasters, “The Cyclone” 1991. Buschi incorporates redactions within a poem itself.

The shape of the speaker’s journey is linear – with episodes that interrupt this. The even lines of the couplets define time as organized while tricking the reader into perceiving the speaker’s world is conventional and relatable – the stories are spiked with the precision  of language and deliberate rhythms that control the line – often suspend time with the reader inside it through implementing end stops or repeated expectant white space that gives the Illusion of certainty and stability that may contrast the content and speaker.

There are prose poems, narratives that take the shape of a block. They carry silence in that the words are pressed into a tension that is meant not to be opened like a locked door or a wall. Bricks do not give. “Tangerine” is a line justified prose poem. This is a performance where the speaker attempts to hide the imperfections of the emotional content. The poet is clever by half. The poem is loaded with information that is quite literally boxed in and hermetic.

The energy of these poems brings the reader through subjective experience – Time, learning, and transforming.

This collection serves more than an offering of transformational life experience, (ironically, the sequencing of the poems tends to be chronological: Girlhood, catholic school experience, sexual encounters, family, death of father and mother, concluding with a mature speaker. The themes we often see laid out neatly in poetry collections of Innocence into Experience. (It is not lost on this poet; she has a poem “I Want” for Blake.) These poems call forth and sculpt from a cleaved heart. They are an achievement of the belief in transformative experience and the speaker’s ability to reenter the self from the cleaved heart of experience, the rendering of loss, grief, and the complicated overlapping emotional density, and layering of one’s losses through experience and time.

The poems Bushi writes are events, familial and sexual, all that determines the psychology of the speaker through time.

The fact that her work begins before it begins (like a ski racer poised at the starting gate at the top of the course; ski poles positioned outward before she shifts the weight of her body back then forward, then propelling herself out of the starting gate in a race that requires mental and physical agility, balance, speed, and timing; it is a race against the elements and obstacles.) This poet controls the velocity of her content, and like a ski racer sees “two gates ahead” to navigate the emotional pin turns and flushes, to avoid ice ruts, to maneuver the body through a labyrinth of obstacles with speed and finesse without undermining the tenor of her voice or eroding the emotional tenacity of her expressed experience. For any poet, the creation of a poem is daunting. The form must marry its content. The variables to consider are innumerable. This poet is a master of sight, of listening. Buchi never throws a line away, she never “wipes out” on the course. Buschi is painstakingly precise in her use of language and punctuation. This is a poet whose writes in lines.  She clearly controls the speed of her lines through enjambments and end stops, including internal punctuation.

The concreteness of the poetic form and its materiality as language produces what we as readers and poets generally agree on as conventions of poetry, in a sense.  This poet turns convention on its head, first with the epitaph “Blue” penned by the author, then by coupling this epitaph with a second epitaph, a copy of a letter to Lucy from John.

The title Blue Physics lends itself to duality – the physical and the metaphysical, arguably. Blue may be perceived as sad, moody, down, and it denotes color. Both of which are nouns, but more specifically both are abstractions – What does it mean to perceive Blue? Neither perception of blue is concrete. It is subjective. The feeling of blue is also slippery. Juxtaposed with “Physics”, the reader’s perception is already uncertain. The mind cannot fully make sense of this abstraction while it is simultaneously tasked with this scientific noun.

We can define physics, but the mind cannot really process or hold onto Blue Physics without processing the title as a question. What is Blue physics? Is there such a thing? Is the title merely poetic, made-up? Is it a thing or is it a mood/color/severance of blue?

The two words are a phrase meant to conflate into a new meaning, another meaning. It confuses because it merges two images and a word that is “focused on understanding the fundamental properties of matter, energy, and interactions…”

The scientific study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion can’t behave through space and time and related entities

1.      Laws of physics explain how objects behave in the world

2.     Shows how mass and energy are linked and explain speed of light

Newtons laws of motion define the fundamental relationship between the acceleration of an object and the forces upon it.

Jones, Andrew Aimmerman. “Introduction to the Major Laws of Physics” Thoughtco, April 28, 2025, thoughtco.com/major-laws of physics-26999071

Einstein’s second Principle based on E=Mc2

Principle of Constancy of Speed of Light: Light always propagates through a vacuum at a definite velocity, which is independent of the state of motion of emitting body. The principle stipulates that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. Unlike all other forms of motion, it is not measured differently for observers in different inertial frames of references”

The Laws of physics explain how objects behave in the world like how gravity works.

This author knows the speed of life; it’s in the physics of her work. She also knows that the laws of physics explain how objects behave ion the world. Everything depends upon the red wheelbarrow of Williams. What he did not say is every action depend on a reaction:  Bertolini’s principle.

The speaker allows to time function as law.  The past is always with us, as is the present is in the future. (Eliot)

Beginning with an abstraction using color, proliferates the idea that there is a strange and maybe illogical congruency between physics and feeling – experience and materiality. The event of this collection unfolds dramatically. The speaker is he observer, the witness, to the subjective experience. This makes also makes her a participant, for one who observes but also participates, is the law of interaction –the Schrödinger Cat Theory.

We cannot witness something without changing, we are not static. The observer participates in the exchange of time and matter. This poet is right to sequence her poems in what initially appears as chronological order. We agree to perceive time as linear through beginnings, deaths, losses, experiences that force us to meet ourselves, those experiences that challenge our identity, our sanity, our sense of the world and the environment. From “Blue” -– the traumatic telling of an event that can only be written abstractly through the piecing together of life’s universal events that we can categorize and make sense of, at least grapple with.  To use language to speak the past experiences is not to relive them or necessarily make sense of them. It is a sort of psychological undertaking that surrounds the central trauma of the speaker.

We know poetry tells truths but in telling truths, the poet makes use of her imagination. We cannot assume a poem is telling a truth, but do we? It is hard to think of Wordsworth and Coleridge not walking across the lake District, wind in their hair, talking of the French Revolution or Blakes’ visions tormenting him. But there are poets who use a persona to fictionalize their experience or lie altogether. Whoever said poets were ethical? Poets are drunks, cheaters, like on their income tax, beat their girlfriends, cheat on their wives, and more.

We hold poets to a higher stand than prose writers who use their experiences verbatim and call it fiction. Do ethics matter in Poetry?

For this Poet, the ethics do matter. So does the complicated telling (or not telling) of a trauma that is embed in the DNA of this collection. There is no way around trauma. Once the ball drops it resonates through you, changes you. You see everything through the lens of the trauma whether you are aware that your body is holding the trauma. Most likely it is. After 48 years the writer gives herself a narrative through cognitive flexibility and an intelligence that comes from everything around her and reframes it. The light is hidden in letters that are inherent in words. You must be able to hear anything. This poet does just that. It is the meaning underneath the message.  In trauma writing you must engage the “right” brain” and put all the details together to make a narrative. You must escape anxiety by using details and tolerating being in the dark. This means you must feel okay with ambiguity. Mary Lou Buschi is more than okay with ambiguity.

The third part of the book has become the past again; the father and daughter reenter the past. Surreal violent “screams” “The Whips and crack:  the father and daughter board a metal carnival car within no doors and a flimsy belt that stretches across their laps.”

“She has no memory if she had fun at all.” (Cyclone)

Here reality is switched. The speaker says. “Maybe it was that my parents had told me my brother/was hit by a car, rather than shot in front of his car.  Later, the speaker reads something about her brother that doesn’t jibe.

“The Day Room” begins “In the middle of my life, I find myself back in high school, where, years ago, I swallowed a handful of pills, landing in a psych ward for two weeks. It comes right after a Dear Lucy letter, now more abbreviated, changed by the past. The third section of the book, sometime after the speaker turns 30 ends “How I’ve missed my life.”

In “Black Maria” the speaker dreams John is alone. He has resurfaced for years in her dream. She imagines she find him home. The poem is not a simple narrative. It is fragmented. The speaker experiences the trauma again in her dreams.

“1991” is a redacted poem where we see the names Warner, 32 known as Robert Buschi, the poet’s last name, who was shot once in the head over a romantic grudge, prosecutors said.  We know more of the truth, but do we? There is less we know in a dear Lucy poem.

The poems flicker, they orbit – there is a sense of the family pretending to be normal.

The poem is directly related to the trauma event. The reader only gets glimpses of this. In Coda there is no I.

Part II-VII it is a Dear lucy letter, and repeating itself. Then redacted.

The narrative breaks apart in Part IV.

There is a coded the.  Please break it.

Says John

Part V the speaker writes in first person “looks back at them” in two couplets – gathers control.

Part IV the fragmentation is further realized.

Dear. Omits John line

Repetition of the

Part VIII The speaker sees the family as “a body, a central heart, but a tree, splitting”.

The closer the speaker aligns herself with the traumatic event, the further disruption of language and coherency.

The poems seem to be driven backwards, in memory –

In “Falling” we see two versions of the truth. The speaker deflects, using the word “metaphor.”

These poems hold the truth to the traumatic event but the paradox in trauma writing is that you can’t remember trauma, you can only recall the memory of it. Two separate things.

Trauma is in the body. The writing is the way to heal the wound of the trauma caused in the body

The poet uses detailed language in many of the poems that directly refer to the trauma wound. She even notices in “Kiss To Kill” “the skin on my legs blooming with purple …In many poems the speaker uses narrative with syntax that clearly gets out the context of the poem. In “Girls” the poem breaks into white spaces, leaving room for silence, for recollection, for the reader to process.  In the poem the speaker thinks through, says “the truth, he could have been my granddaddy, uncle, or even my father, but wasn’t’ the width of the sky is torn we know what happened…”

This is not the original trauma that is the central impetus for the collection.

BLUE PHYSICS is an understatement. Here are the lyrics to “Natural Blue” that the author references in her notes.

“When I first saw you

The sky, it was such a natural blue…”

“Chicory burns grass at your knees

Walk forward from your open wound

Live in dreams, I remain forever

Inside the colors you’ve shown me.”

--from Natural blue by Julie Byrne

Readers will follow the poems to the end that circle back to the beginning of the BLUE PHYSICS, where the first epitaph is the closest the speaker can remember the initial trauma experience. BLUE PHYSICS is an achievement of the highest order. Mary Lou Buschi is a poet to reckon with. She stands on the shoulders of no giants.