A third of our lives are spent in a place that is difficult to remember. What happens in the dark while we sleep? Christine Hume’s latest book of poetry, Shot, attempts to chart this territory, though not through an account of eccentric dreams but instead by an exploration of that which emerges when so much of ourselves disappears. This project is presented as unmediated reportage without the polite reflection that might otherwise attempt to order events in deference to the integrity of the waking self. Those daily hours spent in vacancy are effectively captured by Hume as a kind of private and frequently lost personal history where the self is unbound, where the energy holding up the display of identity dissipates. This departure, that is precipitated by sleep, is narrated with candor and attempts to imaginatively explore the phenomena in its entirety.

As a result, this work, as a whole, has the quality of something eerily familiar, like that of barely recognizing your own recorded voice or glimpsing a reflection on the periphery that disappears when examined directly. There is a kind of recovery of lost moments presented in Hume’s project. And while this ethereal topic has been frequently treated by fantastic literature or the surreal in service of an alternate or provocative truth, Shot refreshingly approaches the experience more directly through an unadorned, matter of fact voice.  This is not to say it lacks any nuance or variety in the forms employed. There are brief, question-driven poems assembled in tight couplets, the presence of distinct voices, prose poetry, and a closet play. Furthermore, the passages exhibit a flexibility of style, employing both the direct and complex, frequently, in brilliant contrast, the lucid will float on intricate twists of syntax, as a jeweler might set a simple stone on folded, golden lace. After a series of disparate images, there is the simple enunciation of “My shadow sat on its stolen body”; or similarly, in the lengthy poem “Between the Way Out and the Way Home”:

Frequently, even in the more lyrical poems of the collection, the “I” is fleeting and distant as it disappears approaching the solitude of sleep. The result, throughout the work, is a presentation of a bifurcated self, one waking identity held together by energy that is obligated to surrender its will, where, as the poet says, “Night gnaws and unknots the anchor” and “A hole in each memory grows.” The significance of Shot is the territory it treats as its subject and the manner in which it proceeds by attempting to navigate the forgotten hours. In the construction of the works there is an emphasis on concrete images, employed in ways similar to Robert Bly’s “deep image” poetry, in that the descriptions, by themselves, are readily identifiable but taken together, in consort, serve as a means to reveal that which would otherwise be unconscious and hidden.

Shot is an invitation into a disquieting landscape where a projected and distinctive self departs. What is presented is an engaging map of a common but shadowed continent that suggests, on its edge, there is a coat room where one must check conscious identity before falling and then emerging to re-inhabit names and faces. In the end, Christine Hume manages to realistically illuminate a portion of an experience often left in the dark without sacrificing detail or deflating that mystery’s potency—no small feat.