DREAM FRAGMENTS (Cactus Press, 2020)
Mirabel
Review by Meggie Royer
Mirabel’s DREAM FRAGMENTS reads like one extended descent into sleep––slipping through shadowy corridors and mirrors, grasping for something that may or may not be there. Throughout her pages, the reader dips in and out of light and darkness. From “Golden Hour” to “Use Weapon,” these poems evoke the kind of molasses-like slog through space that so many of us recognize from dreams.
“Lineage” offers a glimpse into Mirabel’s Indian ancestry and the lingering impacts of grief from familial deaths across generations. Lines like “Some grand / ideas we held at bedtime, but they too slipped / like dying moonlight did / into my grandmother’s bucket” evoke the fantastical nature of childhood; imagination loomed large during the day but sometimes crept silently away overnight. This sense of fantasy is carried from poem to poem as Mirabel explores the depths of desire and the often intimate relationship between good and evil, love and hate, weaving one long dream that at times blurs the line between reverie and nightmare.
“Derealization” illuminates the elusive and at times panic-wrought nature of the dream world in its opening lines, “The day does not change, it simply becomes / another day.” Reading the poem, one is brought to the edge of déjà vu; this poem explores dark and hidden cities and the private lives of strangers, encased like the mirrors of DREAM FRAGMENTS’ opening poem “Linguistic Nightmare.” The transitions from poem to poem are seamless, almost non-existent; the day becomes another day while the poem becomes another poem or perhaps several all at once. Mirabel conjures up primal, animalistic images (“red, sick, and pulsing” heart, blood from an open wrist, a “pair of hands that choke you in closed rooms”) and desires juxtaposed against the soft, liquid delight of summer dreams and worlds far from our own.
DREAM FRAGMENTS is reminiscent of prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. The reader comes into contact with objects, phrases, and concepts throughout every page that somehow lift and carry aspects of the previous page with them, but with an uncanny feeling. How long have we been reading? To whom have we been reading, and whom have we seen or not seen in these pages? What memories of our long-ago dreams have been dredged from the darkened shores of this collection? In “Muscle Memory,” Mirabel asks a boy (or perhaps the reader) to “Play something new / that I have heard before.” Halfway through, the collection at this point feels intimately familiar yet at times infinitely full of surprises, evoking déjà vu while simultaneously conjuring new and ghostly images, rich with detail. One may recall stories that tend to make the news in which a pair of married lovers discover that, years prior as children, they were photographed together by chance during a family vacation, never suspecting or envisioning their future union.
In therapy sessions, from the internet, and even with friends we are often encouraged to keep dream journals, to arise from the heavy mud of sleep and notate the tumbled fantasies of our unconscious minds. Dreams have, for centuries across various cultures, been interpreted vastly differently; in some cultures, oracles and dreamers would sleep side by side for interpretative purposes while in others, dreams offer a chance to communicate with ancestral spirits. Numerous additional possibilities are illuminated in DREAM FRAGMENTS; the reader is offered the opportunity to create their own interpretation. Those of us who scoff or jeer at the notion of a dream journal may even become convinced to start our own, if not to better understand the shadowy realms we enter while asleep. Mirabel does not try to persuade us of the meaning of dreams one way or the other but rather offers, simply, an alternative to our current reality.
As the collection enters its final pages, the colour pink is described over and over in the text, alongside descriptions of heat, desire, love, even ferality––almost as if Mirabel has combined a dream self with a waking self. We move from depictions of moonlight and darkness instead to visions of rose and blush. Are we, the readers, now slowly arising from our own dreams, and back up into the living world, in much the same way as deep sea divers climb back up through water, little by little? Something has shifted, perhaps an ascent.
DREAM FRAGMENTS asks, what do we owe our dreams, and what do our dreams owe us? Mirabel inspires us to take a closer look at our own lineages, including the ones marred with ghosts. After all, as “Nevertheless” tells us:
This is how you make the future: you take the clay from every dream
that has coursed through your body
run a motherly hand
over and over
to smoothen reality.
As the pages come to a close, we are left to craft our own reality.
Meggie Royer is a Midwestern writer, domestic violence advocate, and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Persephone’s Daughters, a literary and arts journal for abuse survivors. She has won numerous awards for her work and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She thinks there is nothing better in this world than a finished poem.