The hallmark of an excellent poem is that you want to read it again and again. And if a bunch of such poems are brought together in a collection, then you are truly fortunate. Folie À Deux by Jennifer Robertson is one such collection where you go back to every poem, with wonder and delight, every time.

The purpose of a review is to let a reader know in advance what she is getting into. To get a sense of what the texture of this collection is, I find it best to begin with a poem. I begin with their opening poem, Bleu:

If it were a pronouncement (I’m sure it is not) no one would have held it against the poet. Almost every poem in this collection has that quality of being a thought that is so much larger than the words it is encased in.

There’s a myriad of themes explored in the collection. It’s hard enough to ascribe a specific theme to an individual poem, let alone the collection as a whole. So let me try and describe the texture of the themes. There’s domestic violence (without ever naming it), there’s grief, loneliness, and at times a political unease. As a poet, Robertson mostly begins with the specific and ends with the general. At times in a very dry, deadpan manner:

At times as a subtle observation —

These images also introduce a turn in each of the above poems, which brings me to what I found the most remarkable thing about this collection.

Language is a sense-making tool. The more seamlessly ‘sense’ travels through a sentence, the better the prose. In poetry, however, language also has its music. The sounds, or more particularly, the arrangement of sounds, can create a unique experience that goes beyond sense, and at its best, the musical experience and the sense-experience travel together.

The sibilant sound is so neatly arranged that the sudden jump in sense from ‘silence’ to the name of a flower is not noticeable at first — by the time you register the sense, the sound has already lulled you into acceptance.

Each line is a consonantal sound cluster. The first with its ‘r’ sound, the second with ‘l’, and the third with ‘s’ sliding into ‘sl’. This is not the only place in this book where one encounters unexpected sound-play. In a poem called ‘Filming Amnesia in panch-phoran‘:

This is the most obvious example of deliberate arrangement of sounds. The book is full of such sound pockets that silently work on you: ‘your palms might mask a meandering intermezzo’, ‘buildings, baby bones baffling stone heads’, ‘subtly, you say, bit by bit’.

It is easy for poets to keep self-indulgently playing with sounds, and even some sense, without having any insights from the experience. Robertson does not just play with sounds; her poems have those sudden, piercing insights that make you stop. In a poem that begins with a memory:

The amplification of a muffled voice is something we all must have experienced but to accidentally find it in a poem, especially as a beginning to something larger and more complex, is astonishing.

Sublime is nothing but throbbing of the void. Robertson gives it a concrete form by calling it an incision. It takes an exceptional poet to do this.

This collection is also a constellation of different interesting forms. For example, there is a poem called ‘The Relevance of Ibuprofen’ which begins almost as if it were a technical manual and ends up being anything but — it shows us the horror of domestic violence through the specific lens of a product manual. This is unique.

The only thing that miffed me about this collection are the allusions, especially to movies. The poet seems to have taken for granted that a reader will know what ‘a metaphysical moment in a Weerasethakal film’ is. This is a bit alienating.

For people in love with poetry, especially with the craft of it, this collection is a gift. It was refreshing to read something so well-crafted and imaginatively rich as this. I look forward to reading more from Jennifer Robertson.