The Way Land Breaks by Rebecca Brock

The typical cruising altitude of a Boeing 737 passenger jet is around 37,000 feet. From the porthole on a clear day, the topography is a series of patterns and shadows. Air travel provides a sense of separation from day-to-day intensity, yet for those who enjoy the view, there is a chance to parse out the geologic, seek out texture and patterns, draw upon the perspective that seven miles above the earth can bring. This vantage permeates the new full-length collection of poems, The Way Land Breaks, by award-winning author Rebecca Brock, whose professional career as a flight attendant informs her lyric sensibility. In “The Flight Attendant Looks Back” Brock reveals: Even though you arrive / you’re never quite home. / Life lands unexpected.

Life does land unexpected for Brock, in both roles of mother and daughter. Sometimes it is with delight that she reveals the unexpected, as in “Expanse, Immensity, Collapse,” the winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Spring Poetry Prize, where the poem is launched by her son’s 4 am question: “When did time start?” and resolves with the unsettling duality that drives this collection forward:

There are at least two ways
to measure a life: the human one
and the universe’s grander score
of expanse, immensity, collapse.
I lie awake to the wash of it.

At times Brock seems open to motherhood, but at other times, Brock seems stunned by the immensity, the enormity of being a mother who is raising first one son, then two. “Tiger” undoes much of the sentimentality of motherhood:

that shaky disbelief
not unlike when there is a baby new,
born, he and I still trembling, still wet,
the orientation—
happens in a moment for a tiger, maybe,
but I floundered,
there, at the changes
at the loss—caught

Both as a mother and as a daughter, tenderness and terror echo throughout many poems, almost jarring in their juxtaposition. In “I Used to Think my Mother Was a Miracle” Brock revisits her mother’s repeated bouts of diabetic shock, how unconscious, her body pressed against her father’s chest like something without bones. Stepping back from the immediacy, Brock recalls,

…We were like people
in a movie when the car
almost drives off a cliff—
for a little while, beneath us,
we’d felt air instead of ground.

It’s through poems that alternately focus tightly on family grief and joy, and others that take an almost topographic perspective that this book is structured, the landscape and geology of the American West breaking through many of the more intimate family memories. Earthquakes, landslides, glaciers, Mt. Ranier, the Missouri River, the Sawtooths, and the Badlands, seeking out bison in the Black Hills, studying the impact of time on this American continent. For Brock, watching the physicality of her growing sons becomes akin to the recognition of erosion, a phrase repeated by her son after a park Ranger uses it, “Geologic Unconformity”:

And I remember how it felt
like something I already knew…
How this is told as some measure
of his immeasurable loss, his gap
between times: one night,
a young enough man
went to sleep, and when he woke
he was old.

Even though you arrive, you’re never quite home. Life lands unexpected.

Throughout the collection, Brock shifts from intimacy and attachment to the jarring sensation of detachment that comes from flight. In “RON: Remain(ing) Overnight”, she reveals, I wake without knowing where, and in “Rove: The Flight Attendant Considers Opportunity” she elaborates,

From the sky, the land looks comprehensible,
even at night—all the clustered lights…
Yesterday I was in Virginia,
saw the sun set in California,
watched it rise this morning in Arizona,
opened curtains to mountains
I did not even know
were there…

What, then, to do with all this distance, what then to do with the disconnect that a pattern of flight can bring? In The Way Land Breaks, Rebecca Brock takes a long view of how time and distance can break open emotional certitudes, consider time, loss. What better poem to resolve this collection then “Raising Glaciers”, the winner of the 2022 Kelsay Books Poetry Prize:

I have been trying to show my sons
how to name—loss—and is it betrayal
to give them such language
in a world shifting toward flashpoint
and heat?

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Bonnie Proudfoot‘s debut novel, Goshen Road, was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews can be found in many journals and anthologies. Bonnie has been nominated for both a Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her 2022 poetry chapbook, Household Gods, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig editions.