Melanie Marttila’s debut collection beautifully evokes many interconnected themes. There is the wondrous sky with clouds “dancing / to the symphony of / blood and sun and / royal navy slate” (“Manitou sky”); the weather and waterways of the author’s home in Northern Ontario, its pines, spruces and birches, its many birds whose “beauty must be / brought with breath to heart” (“peregrine”); and rain that “opens earth / releasing mineral smells centuries trapped / in soil and stone yielding at last / to the sweet release” (“The Scent of a Spring Rain”). Nature is intertwined with family lore and love, and with myth, ancient magic and feminism to summon mystery. We are exhorted to “[t]ake up hammer, learn to / reforge fate. ‘Prentice to apple- / women. Return a fiery arrow, / holder of ancient wisdom. / Wear crown of blossoms. / Walk with hare and vixen.” (“Avalon”).
But it is the moon that’s at the heart of The Art of Floating, resonating with and amplifying all the other themes. Two of the book’s five sections (“Drunken Moon” and “Lunar Observation”) are overtly lunar-focused, but the moon appears throughout the book. She is the goddess Selene: “The dark side of the moon / holds answers… / Selene has carefully / turned her back” (“Visiting Endymion”). She is the power of the feminine: “though / no moon in evidence, her / power felt in the stillness of this night” (“ice storm”). The moon “[r]eveals her full face, / sad eyes sunk in shadow, / mouth opened, / intoning a music so low / I feel it only in my bones” (“Luna”).
Many poems speak to healing, such as in a brief poem evoking the Japanese concept of kintsukuoi, mending broken pottery with veins of gold, or in the title poem where the speaker finds “in the shifting / blues and whites /a peace to shutter the eyes, / still the heart.” The back cover copy mentions surviving mental illness, and the poems of healing feel universal: “And when the music / finally came, it sang / grace and mercy / under stars and moon” (“The Healing”). Healing in The Art of Floating is often primal, with the moon’s role pivotal: “She hangs, blood dark above the / candling spruce, barely visible. // Draw rich blood from sky to heaving / heart. Restore. Realign. Breathe. / … Go forth, / empowered” (“Blood Flower Moon”).
The moon and her healing ways are vividly elaborated in the long poem “Three times three times three” which consists of “lunar observations” through a non-sequentially numbered month, grouped into nine titled sections of three days each: “my womb does not indicate the moon / with pinpoint accuracy / there is no spell i know / can change the weather / dependably.” In one section the speaker wonders “why does / sanity taste like / desert?” In another, they note “the tide is changing / may I change with the tide.” The poem concludes with the moon safeguarding “unwanted” things “until we remember that / unwanted often means necessary.”
Unwanted emotions are indeed often crucial to healing. Melanie Marttila brings this insight and others beautifully into the (moon)light in this rich collection.
Bios
Frances Boyle
Frances Boyle’s most recent book is Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House, 2022). In addition to two earlier poetry books, she is the author of Tower, a novella (Fish Gotta Swim Editions 2018) and Seeking Shade, an award-winning short story collection (The Porcupine’s Quill 2020). She is a regular reviewer with both Arc and Canthius. Raised on the prairies, Frances has long lived in Ottawa on unceded and unsurrended Algonquin Anishinaabeg territory. Visit www.francesboyle.com and follow @francesboyle19 on Twitter and Instagram. [updated in November 2023] Photo credit for headshot: Miranda Krogstad