only half-breathed air by J.F. Merifield

 

The first two beautifully limpid lines of J.F. Merifield’s debut collection, only half-breathed air—

 

in a mirror in a hall

the distance doubles

 

introduce a sequence of poems that reflect upon self and distance—a displacement that is crossed gradually, poem by poem. The poems work through compression and, especially, through image—a mountain lion crouched in a pine tree, “high cloud scathing/sky,” the comforting fragrance of sassafras tea simmering on the stove.… As one reads through the pages, image by image one moves through the long empty hallway of grief toward home and the collection’s stunning final image of the Milky Way.

It’s gorgeous, strange, and absolutely unforgettable.

–Jennifer Atkinson, A Gray Realm the Ocean.

 

Form can create, at times, a sense of confinement, enclosure, and entrapment. But in J.F. Merifield’s deft hands a kind of freedom is spun from form—airy, complex, open, intricate like mycelium. He spins a radiant thread of amazing tensile strength from the most common of elements— like gold from straw—a limited lexicon.  only half-breathed air delights and surprises at the turning of each line, and as one tercet turns to the next, each self-contained, and yet the whole is a series, a sequence, novel and compelling.

–Eric Pankey, The History of the Siege.

 

only half-breathed air is a collection carved from the sediment of aftermaths—an ars poetica of ache, of witness, of what cannot be held yet insists on being named.  J.F. Merifield constructs a poetics of accumulation and fracture, of language pared down to its most essential breath. The collection becomes an elegy for memory and an invocation of the elemental: rot, river, feather, dust. These poems echo as testimony—bearing the emotional residue of unspoken disasters, both global and intimate.

 

The world here is both desecrated and sacred, refracted through the warped glass of loss and resolve. The voice is one of quiet resistance, offering recognition. What survives is not resolution, but the sustained tension between silence and saying. These poems do not blink. They press their ear to the earth and hum.

–Melanie Tague, Poet.

 

A world inverted. A reflection on a life past, lost, or never had at all. A yearning for something that is forever out of reach, and a struggle to reconcile oneself with what remains. In this book of purasu ni, Merifield explores these ideas. The poems are elegiac, moving first through frozen time marred by dust and loss. Of a relationship? Of a sense of self? Of purpose? Then they expand, shifting through grief towards some hope of understanding, some peace to be found in the natural world.

–Anthony Mucciarone, Poet, Hiker, and Garden Designer.

 

This debut collection offers clear images of abstract scenarios set in nature, holding the potential to offer simultaneously what can be told and what cannot be told, what can be captured and worthy of contemplation, and what perhaps is merely “a lingering warmth / almost knowable, then gone.”  The act of fleeting comes to mind.  I continue coming back to these unexpected appetizers.

–Jeffery Allen, Poet, Novelist, and Painter.