Practice, Restraint just may be the first book of poems ever to list, on its acknowledgements page, “My co-workers at Home Savings Bank.” It’s a lengthy list of acknowledgements, actually, including a ninth-grade English teacher (not identified as such), & uses the word “community” freely. That strikes me as telling, given that on the surface Practice, Restraint is a book that has come to market as a prize winner, in this instance as the winner of Fence Books 2005 Alberta Award. My own sense has always been that prize winning volumes are more apt to be the work of relatively isolated writers, a problem that most contests don’t do much (if anything) to alleviate. So Laura Sims may be the exception that proves the rule, or she just may be the exception to pretty much everything.
It was Sims who caused me last February to sit down and take a little zine called Six by Six, bound by naught more than a rubber band, seriously. As the cliché goes, her work literally lept off the page and I ended up quoting half of her contribution in my blog. The poems there, several of which were written from the point-of-view of a teller in a bank, were “a series called Practice, Restraint.” “There is,” I noted at the time, “a spareness to these poems that does not, as a result, surrender anything in its ability to reach beyond the obvious or referential. There is also, as I think all three of these samples demonstrate, a wry, shaded wit that is just a pleasure to read.”
What that publication didn’t do, however, was prepare me for the scope & emotional scale of the series as a whole. If you read the all-star series of blurbs Practice, Restraint has, you might conclude that Sims is by nature a miniaturist: “Brilliantly spare,” Cole Swensen; “engages the lyric critically on its own ground,” Rae Armantrout; “the terrible isolation of words,” C.D. Wright. Each section or poem may in fact tend deploy a minimalist’s vocabulary, but the scale reminds me – perhaps more than anything else – of H.D.’s poems from World War 2 onward. This really is an epic project told with extraordinary discipline. Consider the first poem of the book’s fourth section. The section is entitled “War Book,” and the poem’s title is its very last word:
In mercy a notion of the finished form
like others before them
in rabbit holes
What was that ruckus in the other room?
When you tire
the stone bottle placed on a dune –
milk at dawn
religion at lamplight
Inside it’s a furnace. The boys drink Turkish tea
straight from her lips. Gaily dressed,
this block
resembles my back yard
in
This is a poem that angles & angles & angles, each new facet offering a fuller vision, but without ever “giving away” its subject. As a writing strategy, that’s an exceptionally difficult project – the temptation to slide into abstraction is the risk taken at each point. Sims’ ability here to never lose control is impressive. Nor are these spaces betwixt lines arbitrary, but part of a larger articulation of form (mercy?) that starts, for example, on the very first page of the book, whose title, “Winter in You,” includes those quotation marks:
Have I seen such a tower
Her fleshy, spectacular hand
Would the dogs not find
A tower of ash when the hearth wound down
What it costs
to put winter in you?
Her nails cleanly sculpted, bare
And the autumn?
One buys tires for life
Ablaze—
Then her hair falls down
Her hand
Is the winter
lost, little innocent people?
All the way to the book’s last, a poem first published in Indiana Review & then online by Madison’s Mad Poetry website (one of the best regional poetry websites around, by the way), entitled simply “Poem”:
This is the park where flowers were fitted in spaces and fed.
I myself have been grimacing back.
Comprenez-vous? I offer to pencil you into my Book on Color.
This is the park where trees hang under the lake.
What did I offer you then? A vial of red? A little pressed boy in a cap?
Pencilled myself into beauty.
This is the park where Gladhands rummaged the lake.
Back into girlhood. How would you know him?
I myself have nicknamed the fountain's shades: Pumpkin, Honey-Bun, Witness, Sorry, and Sloth.
Do you remember him dying into the lake? He came up littered and silly.
Look for your name under "Table of Colors."
This is the park where
This is the park beauty
hangs in the lake and the needle-pines point
You will be featured on page 35 under "Salmon Pink."
back into beauty, girlhood, his cap. He was small and fit snugly into the dive.
You might hear an echo of Michael Palmer, someone whom Sims lists as a favorite poet, here. But it’s very nearly the only such echo in the entire book. Far more important, to my eye, ear & mind, is the degree of exactness evident everywhere, and how it sets up scale as a dimensional presence. The perpetually recurring figure of girlhood – quite a different category, say, than childhood, palpable in the allusion to Lewis Carroll in the first poem above, audible in the volume’s final line – is, I think, a key to the reading. Imagine Alice Pleasance Liddell’s perspective on her relationship with Charles Dodgson, if you will, and the tale you get might not be Through the Looking Glass at all. A question I find myself asking, throughout the book, is just whose war is this? Which is what I hear, say, in the volume’s next-to-final poem, a chilling piece entitled “Paperback” in a section called “Paperback Book”:
so many
dead girls
in this shit-hole
cave,
Batman,
says Robin,
his ward
left in charge
of the lot
of their streamlined
monotonous
fairy-tale
island-whore
getaway
Get Practice, Restraint not because these are the brilliant lyrics of a great new talent – tho that is true enough – but because this is one of the most substantial books you will find in this or any other year.
