Kathleen Spivack translates street scenes to narrative eclipse in her 2009 Sow’s Ear chapbook competition winner: A History of Yearning. Each of the three sections, “A History of Yearning,” “Earth’s Burnt Umber,” and “The Lost World” employ a punctuated use of line, which adds pauses of breathiness to fleeting descriptions of emotions and scenes, both personal and historical. This use of line, along with her ethereal subject matter, evokes the desire for items lost or moments never fully achieved, making the collection cohesive as a whole.

The title poem, “A History of Yearning,” exemplifies this breathlessness of the text in the opening lines, “For air, for breath when we didn’t / know we were gasping —” (1 – 2). The use of the phrase “this gasping” might at first appear to be a too casual interpretation for the reader; however, Spivack maintains this as a controlling metaphor through the images found within the rest of the poem. Her application of descriptions, such as “sinewy flayed grimaces” and “airy aqua pleasures” add to this effect, but also show these images within a historical framework (using a discussion of the “Sir” in Sir Francis Bacon in parenthesis).

It is this combination of the ethereal images with historical and situational discussion that makes Spivack’s poetry collection interesting as a whole. The following poem, “Monet’s ‘Path,” and a poem in the third section, “Pale Light in the Luxembourg Garden,” all display the poet’s discussion of the present with the past, in essence defining how sensation and image become entangled within a history.

Another reading of the use of history lies in its connection to cultural yearning. In her poem, “That Light. That Photograph. That Couple,” the situation of the couple below the horizon line, while children play above them, is a lasting image. Her theme continues to shine when she introduces the need to remember and the absence of a camera: “a momentary longed-for balance of the camera / might prolong, file under the word ‘remember’” (9 – 10). Again is her use of the beautiful image, and again the line breaks show a stumbling, a quickness, of the desire to maintain a fleeting image, or to insert oneself into the image and experience the barred sensations.

Overall, this is a compact collection with a sincere theme. The thematic integrity of this book shows the careful attention to presence and history in connection with the senses. The author appears to achieve her goal of informing this connection of history and emotion through her choices of narrative, description, and line breaks.