The Forest Will Carry Us There: Review of Instructions at Sunset by Geraldine Connolly Reviewed by Laurel Benjamin

Terrapin Books 2025, 94 pages, $18.00 [paperback], ISBN: 978-1-947896-85-7

Geraldine Connolly's new poetry collection, Instructions of Sunset, uses a deft hand to converse with nature, where questions of truth must be answered. In poems set on a Pennsylvania childhood farm and Arizona, among other locations, her poems revel in darkness, making us prey to death and grief, while at the same time a soft breeze lingers. Women escape on wings, yet she also renders women as prey, caught unawares. Foxes offer a transformation of one's self and trunks unlock. A metaphoric bridge conveys us to other words for another glimpse of a friend. She has us standing there, aloft in past and present, considering our own regrets. The impossible is possible.

In "Letter to Joanna," a collapsed bridge jumpstarts the memory of a friend, where "A river passed your old house... we read our poetry to each other." Turns in the lines take us first to a psychic the speaker visited with her friend, reminding her she was a farmer's wife waiting for the husband to return from Vietnam, then to the present, where she still waits for "you to reappear." The "you" is intentionally ambiguous, allowing her to both wait for the husband and for the friend. With the second turn from specific to "I don't think that / there is only this one world," we are taken between wars. This is followed with the third turn: "You were my bridge to other worlds." She opens up the concept of waiting in a liminal space, with "other worlds," meaning to wait in purgatory, death, or what we can or cannot understand about after death. (43)

The turns in this epistolary poem speed up the pace while also creating more space, in repeating the word "waiting." What felt simple to begin with now is subverted. Though if we re-examine the first stanza, "A river passed your old house," may stand as a symbol for Chiron the ferryman and the inevitable journey. The poem ends with the fox, a symbol for her deceased friend: "I wonder which one you might live in now... a forest with a fox that is just now / coming through the light.." Thus nature serves as a vehicle for the waiting room between worlds that her friend has disappeared into, where everyone one needs to survive. Further, the speaker posits herself in contributing to that transformation: "the one I whistled up, as if [the fox] were you," because music conjures up more than what one can see. Seeing is understanding; whistling up a fox "as if that were you" is more a wistful consideration, but as near to magic as she can get. (43)

The fox also appears in the early poem "Two Foxes, which grounds the collection in literal imagery: "Ribbons of muscle and fur... erupt from their house of snow." Then she cuts to the conceptual: "Across the channel of unknown, / a restless wish rises, an urge / to escape my body's border." From foxes' bodies to a human body. This "channel" encourages an access to restlessness, a desire to take action. How the speaker relates to the foxes, how they are part of the landscape, tells us what is possible: if the speaker can escape the physical body, she can become a fox herself. Perhaps she can also become part of the "sky [which] lets loose its white shrapnel," a harshness in winter which mirrors the soul. This struggling against the body is an essential part of the book, and here, in the penultimate line, "leaves drown, numbed into tatters," where she grapples against everything that feels impossible. The final line is consistent with everything that came before, but at the same time a conundrum: "Wherever I go, I want to leave." The word "body" is more than personal. Perhaps she is speaking about where humans end and where nature begins. How can one describe this space except to use the word "border"? "Two Foxes" is one of the most conceptual pieces in the book, undercutting grounding description with the internal core where we can only close our eyes with understanding, to the point that we are the ones left in "tatters." There is a closed-up feeling at the end as opposed to the later "Letter of Joanna," which provides a waiting room, a bridge, opportunities. No, Connolly doesn't make it simple. (9)

But we need a container for the creatures. Trees are Connolly's imperative structures where truth can be found. Trunks are hearty, stable, reliable, supporting a whole network of life. In the earlier poem "Ars Poetica," after Remedios Varo's painting Armonia, an attic is the setting for one kind of trunk. They "remain unlocked and // must be opened, so many ideas, / so many empty myths to transform." Myths are tied here with family heritage described in other poems, along with the myths girls grow up with, before figuring out how to break the feminine mold. The myths are "empty," meaning false, but this does not mean the trunks are empty; no, they are full of "restless voices [that] are about to fade," ghosts of the past haunting the girl-speaker. The simile about the voices is the same restless kind described in "Two Foxes," how "they may escape, like birds" with their wings. The penultimate line suggests transformation is possible, yet it's also terrifying. More of her contradictions. We are given hope, yet death and grief are always at the window: "hurry, for outside, minutes pass, / their wings brush the windows / like muffled screams." The wings of minutes entreat us, time able to take off and escape, yet "muffled screams" belie the danger, death hovering. We can hear the muffled sound of beating wings. The ekphrastic poem is after Varo's Armonia, which means harmony, as in music, as in getting along with one's self, others, other things. The poem is anything but harmonious, though the music here is gorgeous. (8)

Trunks also appear in another ekphrastic poem, "The Great Forest: Max Ernst," based on the painting from 1924. Nature is dependable, though it mutates through elemental forces. We learn what lies ahead within a wall of trees with a solar disk with an opening, and an apparition of a bird. The forest appears as saw-toothed wood, desecrated, savage, and "The trunks lean on / each other, tilted, askew." One bird is left, a survivor. A ring floats like a sun, peering through the trees. When we turn on the phrase "tilted, askew" and head to the bird image, then over to the ring, we land on the phrase "the forest's gloom." She teaches us to see: "The bird is lit— / a nightingale imagining / quiet days when / the war is over / and the small animals who hide / beneath the underbrush / are ready to be reborn." She has saved up this wisdom. A non-specific war allows us to consider our own. Further, the nightingale has agency, as it imagines. I can't but think of Shakespeare and his birds, and in Romeo and Juliet how this bird features, not the lark (a day-time bird.) It's ironic that the nightingale images quiet, because it's such a chatterbox, filled with complex sounds and stories. The transcendence, though, is how the bird is lit somehow, at night or in a dark forest. This ending brings hope as small animals are "ready to be reborn." Made possible after war, after "exploded bark" and "lopped trunks." The impossible is possible. Through enchantment and terror we can't exactly understand, yet there is a way through. (46)

Further, it is the sonics in "The Great Forest" which imbue the piece with a volatile tone: "bruised doves" and "scarred woods" in the first stanza are followed by "exploded bark" and "trunks twist" in the second stanza, with the harsh "ex" and "tr" and "st." When we arrive at "Now I see it. The bird is lit," the perky "it" suggests an alert speaker, and the bird, "lit," is alert, a thinking bird, so even the "quiet" is crisp. The latter emphasizes the defensive elements of nature, along with mood of the doves, trees, and birds. The speaker includes herself there, commonality underscoring what's to come. When the piece ends with "reborn," the "n" not harsh but final, "born" harboring in "reborn," as again and again, creating an utterance of forever. (46)

Unlocked trunks and red foxes speak for the collection as a whole, as they articulate a remembrance of the past and yearning for what's lost. The hope of transformation stems, in part, from a time where women fought for their rights. It seems fitting then that Connolly encompasses those times, not just in the wide scope of the book's varied poems describing loss of the family land, regrets about the relationship with the mother, dear friends, but also how nature's key unlocks the truth, where the poet is caught in a liminal space: sometimes there is a bridge to understanding, sometimes we hear "the wings of minutes," hovering. Connolly cuts no corners in her work, including a lush intimacy with self and sky, but she also shares a vision that is not easily reachable. Come for the softness, stay for the epiphanies.