Listening in the Dark by Suzy Harris

Listening in the Dark, a collection of poems by Suzy Harris, is a slim chapbook, but that by no means makes it slight. Hard of hearing her entire life and fitted with a cochlear implant in her sixties, Harris takes the experiences of deafness and—with stark language and no end of gentle humor—creates tightly woven poems that explore the difficulties of communication, the expansiveness of silence, and the wonder at hearing sounds for the first time.

From the very first poem, “Broken Listening,” Harris makes room for the weight of silence:

They say people who grow up in two languages
have stronger memories,
            but what of those who grow up with two languages,
                        one that is silence?

Most of the stanzas in this poem end with the word silence, and often she will let it sit on its own line, wrapped in white space, allowing that weighty absence to saturate the page. The language of silence is the language of Harris’s poetry: as a reader, I found myself suddenly attuned to what I myself could hear in her work, the crackles and static of half-caught words, the padded sensation of total quiet. This is a collection that draws attention to the shape of loss as much as it does anything else.

Harris’s poems are spare and direct, reaching out in an entreaty for understanding of the daily inconveniences, the frustrations of being deaf. Life is an erasure poem where you / try endlessly to find the missing. // Solve for X when you don’t know / the other parts of the equation. // … When you feel exhausted by the work / of hearing, bathe in quietness (“How to Be Deaf”). I love the energy of this poem, the multiple metaphors that attempt to encapsulate the experience of deafness becoming as strained and frustrated as the work of hearing. The poem, in the end, sinks back into quietness as a balm, a place to rest that is still an unresolved ending. There is a lot of humor in these pieces as well, a tangible exasperation as she relates the daily experiences of Sorry, I missed the first word, / the last word, the middle word. (“Could You Repeat That?”)

Over the course of the collection, the poems move from Harris’ daily experiences as someone who is hard of hearing to life after a cochlear implant. The sudden tide of new sounds and the difficulties of parsing them arrive in a wave of delight, and the language becomes unrestrained, looser, as the poet is awash in new sounds, like a toddler / pointing what’s this? and what’s this? / wanting and needing to know the world, // each sticky, wondrous bit (“Learning to Hear Again”). This babbling rhythm, the gumminess of exploration and uncovering, took me to a place of childlike wonder, so that I had to pause and think when she then asked, Tell me, what is the sound of snow falling? / What is the sound branches make / as they bend under the weight of snow? Harris’ focus on the sounds that we hear, that we miss, and that we disregard made me change the way I pay attention to what can sometimes feel like a steady stream of background noise.

Tell me, what is the sound of snow falling? What is the sound branches make as they bend under the weight of snow?

My favorite poems in this collection were the ones that were about Harris adjusting to her new hearing, first simply to sort out the cascade of information from the cochlear implant, as in “Language Lessons”: Let dings and ticks and beeps recede. / Let syllables glove together. / Let words arrive true and clear. Beneath those dings and ticks is Harris listening with an ear for poetic language, the syllables that glove together, winnowing down each word and line to that which is the most poignant, the most evocative. And then, as in “Symphony at Powell Butte”, she begins to hear beyond just the sounds themselves, to the larger world itself as it tells its own story: I hear wind dance in tall grasses / and earth’s slow rotation. / … I hear ancient rocks reminiscing to each other / about when they were part of something bigger. Harris’s unusual relationship with hearing has created someone deeply engaged in the act of not just hearing but listening, of finding connections with the natural world that might have easily been missed, of trimming away the unnecessary to grasp the right word, the right sound.

Despite the tangible feeling of renewal and expansion in the latter half of the collection, Harris is quick not to let it overtake the journey she has been on, the way that she has always been pulled between absence and clarity, loss and restitution. In “Lost and Found”:

 The survey asks: are you still as lost
as you were before? You mean in following conversations? No.
… But nor was I lost before, or maybe I was—all those missing words,
and me, grasping for sense in the space between (“Lost and Found”).

This collection sits comfortably in that liminal space between, finding humor and meaning in both deafness and hearing so that, despite all those missing words, Harris creates sounds and silences that somehow resonate in equal measure.

---

Brenna Crotty is the Senior Editor for CALYX. Her reviews and humor articles have been published in CALYX Journal, Cracked.com, and CollegeHumor.com. She lives in Portland, OR, with her husband, son, and cat.