Review: Through Time Waves

E. Merwin
October 2022

So often poetry is inscrutable—so deeply private one can barely discern its form. Like pebbles on the bed of a stream beneath the moving water—we feel but cannot see them.

Equally inscrutable are the poems of Marcia Arrieta in through time waves. Poems “where the ideal equals vision” we might sense the poet’s intention, but we cannot quite see it. And as a reader I seek to understand the writer, to see their vision as if standing before a painting in a museum, an image open for interpretation, but an image nonetheless.

caterpillar ant hedgehog

we enter the world
through
secret passageways

open boxes
climb walls

we wander
outside
the ordinary
camouflaged
in language
or
maybe
drawings

keys
hang
from
trees

we
subvert
haiku
into
psychology
or
maybe
rhythm
random

And so I have always felt gratitude for Blake for his prints that have the solidity of a door. How rare to find a volume of poems and visual images. And so I am grateful to Arrieta’s collection where each collage is a portal to the poetry.

For me, each image is like a mystical map—not a Google map with point by point directions to a single destination; rather a visualization of the poet’s state of mind. As with the poem possible/impossible where the text brings to mind strata, the layers of existence “from mystic to stoic to saint”.

possible/impossible

poetry structures the ascent partakes of
the syllable from mystic to stoic to saint
perhaps a soliloquy perhaps a rebellion
the sky as geography the soil as memory

But in reading the words of the poem, I could not be sure that I had arrived—that I understood the poet’s intention and desired destination. However, with a glance at the collage beside it, I felt I had arrived at a meaning, a point somewhere in the vicinity of the poet’s intention.

For me as a reader who craves connection, this is the pleasure in reading through time waves.

Through Time Waves on Arteidolia Press →

E. Merwin’s website→