Captivity by Laurie SheckKnopf, 2007

In this slim (but not slight) collection of poems, Laurie Sheck draws from a number of inspirations: the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Smart, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American captivity narratives. Poems who take their titles from phrases within them (“But couldn’t cross,” “This austere and fierce machinery”) are interspersed with poems called Removes (“The First Remove,” “The Second Remove,” and so on). This word, taken from Mary Rowlandson’s account of her own captivity and restoration, denotes distance, steps away: connotes a move from civilization and the self. In Rowlandson’s narrative there are twenty removes, the last of which includes her restoration to (colonial) society. Sheck’s book has seventeen: it ends still in the wilderness, or the maze of the book’s cover. These are elegant poems, full of light, full of sharp images. Sheck uses the language of structure, of order and the closeness of disorder (the language of the body, of cells, of genes). This is also the language of things stripped bare: of where remove can take you.