Read This: Breach by Anne Haines

My new weekly post on books you must read begins today with Breach ($14, Finishing Line Press) by Anne Haines. I knew Anne was a fine a poet from the work she's posted on her blog and from what I've read in various journals. However, I wasn't prepared for the absolute brilliance of her chapbook. There is an undeniable sense of wanting in these poems, and a building sense of stagnancy (or "entrophy" as one poem suggests) that only the seashore can wash clean. The word "breach" appears in various forms throughout the collection, including the leaping whales that break the surface of the ocean. The moon, the tides, the waxing and waning of love, the change of seasons are all here in elegant detail. The narrator is "landlocked" and, like another definition of breach, her future is on temporary hold. Harbingers and incidents are all linked in some way back to the sea, which seems so close and so far away. Breach moved me; made me catch my breath. Every poem and every line is essential. 

Landlocked, August

Every day I sleep a little bit longer,

lose a little bit more.

There are no whales here, not even zoos.

An unfamiliar bird squawks outside my window.

There is a landscape I'm in love with,

far from here. It cannot send me flowers

or call me on the phone. I dream

of water at the tideline, kelp and wrack,

wake salt-stained. I am tired

of every form of longing.

This landlocked bed rocks and rocks

me back to sleep for hours

till I wake irretrievably, gray, displaced.

I consult the atlas, the encyclopedia of weather,

the fortune teller's cards. Consensus:

an approaching front, an unbreachable border,

my own sense of resignation. But listen:

it's almost autumn. The first trees

are already changing , leaves gone the color

of the edge of something, the last

flare of warmth as I hurtle, coiled

in sheets like a dangerous animal,

towards another equinox, towards that balance

of all my days here in the center of the world.