Truant of the Stintless Sun

by Christina Chalmers

“Truant of the Stintless Sun (April 2021) is adorned with magnified images of dust on either cover, and the poetry within appears resigned to the involvement of our matter with all others’, the impossibility of extraction. It laments the endless procession of days, with much to say about the light of the sun, which “comes / and goes daily doing itself / wonders.” These might be the observations of an insomniac, someone banished to the other side of the clock. “This is not a representation of hell,” she writes, anticipating the question.

Long columns of narrow lines commingle with blocks of prose. Here, too, is something like a pandemic diary. The poems are mostly dated from the months of February, March, April, and May 2020. Chalmers considers briefly the state of the craft in the midst of a crisis: “The condition of poetry is breath / that is not a condition of life.”

From the colophon, we learn the book was written “with the memory of” Chalmers’s father, who died in 2019. Much of it is given over to grief. “I love so fucking much,” she writes, “the ones / already dead.” She draws the dead “up / and out of the well, like a draught.” Elsewhere, she fabulates a “woe that worked.” Many of these poems end in moments of brief respite: “I leave me alone.”” — Maxwell Paparella

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