Rust Fish By Maya Jewell Zeller (A Review By P. Jonas Bekker)

Childhood memories, how important they are. The very earliest impressions we experience as children, the places we grow up in, they shape who we are later in life. It seems that, the older we get, the more everything we see and do and think stands in the light of those shaping years of first times for everything.

If you grow up in Washington State, near the Canadian border, near the ocean and amidst some of the largest forests of the northern hemisphere, there will, wherever you go next, inevitably be sea and trees and plants and lonesome back roads in your mind forever.

Maya Jewell Zeller has ventured to work her shaping memories of being first a child, then a young woman in the Northwest of the United States into an impressive volume of poetry. There are 55 poems in her debut collection Rust Fish, which is divided into four nameless sections that can be read as a chronological narrative. Each section starts with a poem called ‘The Rust Fish’.

The order of the poems shows this collection to be well thought out. The first ‘Rust Fish’-poem firmly positions the book geographically by mentioning Bellingham, WA and Whatcom Creek, which lies just east of Bellingham. It also establishes the perspective this first section will use: the magic but scary world of a small child – a little girl. The fish appear to be part of a fountain of sorts. The little girl leans her bike against it and stares at the teeth of the fish. Although the fish (‘once they glitzed chrome / under smoke-town moon) are rusted and old, she imagines that, at night, they free themselves from the rods that hold them and fly ‘as if / they might spawn stars’.

In one powerful image, Maya Zeller has captured what Rust Fish is about. It is about things past. About a childhood long over in a place that, in it’s remembered form, doesn’t exist anymore.

In the next few poems, and in the book in general, many plant names are mentioned. These serve to further root this poetry in the soil it, or at least the material it uses, grew from. ‘Skunk Cabbage’, one of them is called, after a plant with beautiful but foul-smelling flowers.

The bracken fern mentioned in the next poem may be a poisonous plant, but still it figures prominently in the concept of ‘home’:

The Woman Who Bought Our Place by the Ocean Burned It Down

Where the house had been, hot ash
singed the bracken fern. Except it wasn’t a house;
it was a gas station, and perhaps

the ferns burned up
too, but there must have been blackberries,
skunk cabbage, ocean spray

with its little foam flowers
hanging like grapes by the chicken coop,
leaves grayed by the smoke

but not ruined. And the apartment up top
had held curtains, a couch. My parents could still see
the shudder of crimson against dusk,

hear the bang of the frame
as it fell. Where was I? Lying like cinder
in the room of my birth?

Perched like a gull in the bathroom
upstairs, rising through the hole in the floor
my father chainsawed to let up the heat?

They stood together that night
holding my young body, listening to the waves,
the loud crack of salt against rock,

the occasional outbreak of wings
scraping black, their nostrils flared
with the confluence of creek to sea.

I quote this poem in full because it contains many of the things I like about Rust Fish, but also a couple of things I don’t like.

I don’t like the sombre, solemn tone this poem has. Many of the poems in Rust Fish – with some notable exceptions, these being the better poems in the book – have this slow, droning rhythm due to the semi-metered verse that goes on and on and on. More rhythmic variation would have been nice, especially in such a large collection of relatively long poems.

And this is another problem I have. I feel that in many places, Zeller could have been more concise. For example, she mentions the ferns twice. For the image, this is quite unnecessary. One could also argue that the last four lines add very little and could have been omitted.

However, I like how Zeller carves out a concept of ‘home’ – almost literally in this particular poem – from the all-dominating natural backdrop of these memories. And most of all I like how she just keeps piling one memory upon the other, mixing them in seemingly illogical ways, the way memories are piled up and mixed in our heads.

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~P. Jonas Bekker is a writer and a poet from the Netherlands.~