The Epiphany of Blue: A Review of John Linstrom's To Leave for Our Own Country

The first poem of John Linstrom’s To Leave for Our Own Country opens with “I remember when everything mystical/was connected.” Over the course of “Liturgy Next Door,” Linstrom finds that connection in childhood memories of car tires thumping across roads home, the shuffling of bodies rising from church pews, the punctuated miniscule sounds of church heaters clicking or just the settling in of the building in the in-between silences of his piano lessons. He gives us a hymn in celebration of continuity as he threads one sound to another into a seamless garment. 

But the poem, and this collection, don’t halt there. He remembers the power failures that prompt lighting a kerosene lamp which, as in the opening, connects to the image of the red-glassed eternal flame in the church and how its eternity carries from a new candle being lit from the old candle before it goes out. The young John asks, “[W]hat if when they’re changing / there’s a breeze? Someone left / the window cracked?” His father answers, smiling, that that sometimes happens. “It’s just a candle, John.” In this exchange, Linstrom gives us a wider view of connection, one in which the gaps between notes on the piano, power outages, and breezes blowing through errant open windows are not disruptions of the mystical but further patterns in the wider weave. Catastrophe haunts To Leave for Our Own Country and here in the opening poem, Linstrom, through a father’s wisdom passed down to his son (like one candle lighting another perhaps), acknowledges it.

Linstrom goes on to write of a “chill” he feels but doesn’t name in everyday moments, the breath of that once-worrying breeze, but with a difference. Instead of what severs connection, here the unnamed chill runs like a thread through his life and his family. He only knows that it has to do “with darkness / and repeating beats, with something coming home.”

At the heart of the entire collection is this unnamed thing that blows through Linstrom’s experiences and his poems, the paradox that what threatens change (the wind blowing through the errant open window) and the need to leave the status quo behind is also the thread that binds and pulls forward, that draws one to “come home” to something new.

We often think of redshifts, those lengthening wavelengths of the retreating object... Less so do we consider the opposite, the blueshift of that which approaches, which rushes to meet us.

To Leave for Our Own Country roughly follows the arc of Linstrom’s life in five sections. The first section, “Mouth o’ River,” offers an intimate portrait of childhood home in poems such as “What Was Precious.” Here is where there are “ladybugs and sow bugs precious / as father’s green coffee canteen, as mother’s / running shoes,” where the speaker imagines “pigeons descend, tornadic, a roar / of grease-beaked benediction, an apocalyptic vision.” This is a space alive and bristling with childhood’s close observation of the natural world. It is also one filled with the innocence of childhood’s near-sighted encounter with history, as in the moment when the speaker and friends ditch their musical rehearsal and roam the halls of their school, “piratic / and sift through the boxed-up rotary phones, lift / transmitter, lean into receiver, take // whichever one had weathered best the words / of students to their parents, old ones now/ to dead.” These lines especially reveal Linstrom’s careful and subtle poetics. “Lift” and “take” as end words reverberate with the kids’ “piratic” joy. That this is deep past for Linstrom, and these poems a kind of archaeological excavation, shines in the short poem, “Retting,” that concludes the section with these lines: “we must rot / from the inside: / free the best fibers/make ready the linen.” Throughout, Linstrom clothes To Leave for Our Own Country in the images of religion, as in the opening poem’s candle and again here with the linen, sacred pure cloth for dressing altars and priests.

In the section, “Graduates,” Linstrom traces his college years in Indiana and Iowa, where ordinary moments of mac ’n’ cheese, pumpkin carving, and parties bump up against a current of anxiety in poems about calving icebergs in Antarctica the size of Delaware and the contradiction of a presidential call to sequester carbon listened to on a cell phone made of that very oil. “I forget // sometimes the way the world is swept for me, / the oil that forms the plastic, metals heaved // from mines and heavy metals concentrated / to this short term task. I hold it here—” The world widens, enough that icebergs might slip into those catastrophic spaces where the breeze blows, where the chill threads through. 

In “Another Coast,” Linstrom moves to New York to pursue a PhD. The poem’s views widen out yet further, encompassing both personal relationships and intergenerational responsibility in a poem such as “The Day the Machines Came” in which Linstrom charts the way oil and extraction have figured across the generations of his farming family, from the luxury of bananas brought back from town to the schooling that sends children away from the land never to return. With “we” as the only subject of the poem across generations, Linstrom takes on the weight of a hundred years of decisions, ostensibly good ones all. They eventually carry the family line away from stewardship to an estrangement from the anonymous land where “Now someone // somewhere exfoliates the earth…” and the final lines, “We thirst, need money, / dig new graves and leave the land to play.” There is in the ambiguity of that final phrase a recognition of a historical abandonment of the land for frivolities, but perhaps also a yearning that the land itself might, apart from any “we” at all, have its own agency. In this first half of the collection, we see Linstrom serially leaving places and stages of life behind, but in “Autumn Stridulation,” the final poem of this section, he introduces us to the coming of his infant daughter growing like “a little gourd” in his wife.  There was leaving, but now something is coming.

At the heart of the collection is “Blueshift,” a long poem in six parts. We often think of redshifts, those lengthening wavelengths of the retreating object, whether the ambulance whose sirens deepen in the night or the reddening edges of the universe as it relentlessly expands. Less so do we consider the opposite, the blueshift of that which approaches, which rushes to meet us.  In the six moments of this poem, Linstrom muses and riffs on the color blue: the mystery of its appearance in nature from things decidedly not blue; blue as the fear of a near-drowning in Lake Michigan; blue as a thing already lost to the present even as it arrives at the eye; blue, the impossibility of the universe that rushes outward; blue the color of the lake whose deep origin Linstrom recounts; and finally, blue, that thing not found in anything itself, but which nonetheless flashes through the faceted fragments of the previous five sections stitched together into this final one—blue, that which arrives mysteriously as everything else flies away.

This is, I think, the heart of what Linstrom is aiming to say. In the final section of this collection, “By Another Road,” his poems cover his time in New York as the new father of a baby daughter. The poems here ache with an empathy not so present before, often figured through children or the prospect of children.  He imagines his neighbors down the street in “After Ida,” who drowned in basement apartments during cataclysmic flooding while he and his pregnant wife waited at home for the rain to stop. “We are weighed / down. Still we wonder what it would mean / to plant a branch, grow a tree, / gather the rainwater. Life or death.” As with many of the poems in this collection, there is the implicit anxiety of climate change weighing the speaker down, wondering what it might mean to bring life into such a world where neighbors drown in their homes. 

And yet, something comes. In “The Life Was the Light,” Linstrom returns to the horror of the apartment drownings, fully inhabiting it as “we” experience it, and yet nonetheless a baby is “born to earth and roughage” and falls asleep, its “fingers grip[ping] yours impossibly hard.” In the tender “Strange Praise,” Linstrom counsels us that “You’ll never speak these sounds, so let them ring. / Your ears are shut—so smile at everything.” In this I hear him tell us to stop trying to reach out to the world and instead let it come to us instead, blueshifting into our lives. This is, and I think the whole collection is aiming to teach us this, an act of humility in the face of just this, here. “Humble up!” and “Child yourself,” Linstrom tells us. The final poem is, fittingly, “Day of Epiphany, 2021.” This holiday of the celebration of arrival takes place in the ordinariness of a Queens laundromat where Spanish language newscasters buzz on overhead TVs about a mob storming the Capitol. “Lift your eyes // and look around,” the speaker tells us—be here, see here, know here—“we must leave / for our own country by another road.” As the child speaker of the first poem worried about the breeze that comes and cuts the thread of eternity, who tries to reconcile that chill with “coming home,” Linstrom the new father ends on this ominous and somber note, where leaving and coming collide, knowing that the world we want comes with us in our leaving by roads we fashion ourselves—that it flashes blue, mysteriously,  perhaps where no blue can be said to be.