Book Review: Allison Titus's Sum of Every Lost Ship
Amanda Hosey
Cleveland State University Poetry Center
78 pp.
The title of Allison Titus's first book of poetry, Sum of Every Lost Ship, seems cold, almost clinical, as in mathematics, but it moves beyond the familiar in this way by using this measured feeling to probe the way we look at things. Charlie Chaplin once said, "Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles," and this is the idea behind Titus's book. The ship is a metaphor: it stands for anything that it's possible to lose. In the title poem, "Sum of Every Lost Ship, Minus Its Apology," Titus writes, "What unit of measurement / besides fathom. Because the river forgets nothing." Titus weaves this theme throughout the book—mathematicizing everything one can experience, emotionally and physically.
In the book's first part, Titus presents readers with a series of love poems, but they are far from typical odes. Instead each exhibits a calculated view on love; this, however, does not hinder the success of these poems. Rather, it offers readers a poignant and believable view of love as mechanical. In "Fetish," Titus writes:
He was tremble and corsage field-noting my ribs. Wherefore gathered then unfathomed. It is easier to understand the history a muscle can hold if you picture the heart as a mechanism of spool and hinge. A box like you'd find in the shed.
Here Titus writes with a precision and intensity rarely seen in debut collections. Poems like "Shipbuilding" and Modern Romance" are refreshingly haunting.
The second part of the book focuses on decay and an overall lessening of all things—people, animals, places, days—a slow erasing of everything that fills life. In "Former Automotive Plant," Titus writes:
there is nowhere to go that isn't slowly subtracting its ache, each long white hour, from decades of unribboning.
Poems like the above—or "Inclement," in which Titus informs readers, "Once there was no language / for weather, just The sky is low and birdless,"—evoke a sense of a forgotten past that slowly moves further and further out of reach of present society.
Part three of the book is one long poem, "From the Diary of Anna Anderson," which comprises seven smaller sections. A persona poem, it chronicles the time Anna Anderson, a woman some have suspected was Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, spent in Berlin's Dalldorf mental institution in the early 1920s. In this section, Titus gives a clear and convincing voice to Anderson through which she shows the toll life's "subtractions" take on a person's emotional state. Though scientists now have completely discredited Anderson as the potential Duchess, Titus allows Anderson to feel confident in whom she is, never questioning her identity. Nor does Anderson ever expressly acknowledge that she believes herself to be the Duchess. Much of the strength of this section relies on the white space within the poems—exhibiting Anderson's state of confusion, as well as an overall theme of loss, as actual pieces of the poem disappear within Titus's work.
In the book's fourth part, Titus focuses her attention on obsessions. The section begins with, "Obsessive Compulsive," which presents readers with a speaker trying to save herself and her lover through a series of compulsive rituals. For example, the speaker explains, "Two times two is the number of taps to give / the doorknob when entering or leaving," and, "To keep the house from catching fire, / tap the clock twice with a spoon." In this section, readers see poems varying from the cloud infatuated, "Meteorology," to the cryptic, "Instructions from the Narwhal," a poem comprised of a series of mysterious how-to sections from the point of view of one of nature's strangest animals, the narwhal.
The book's final part functions both as a sequence of epistolary poems and a means to unify the book's mathematical motifs. Each section of the book (with the exception of the third) contains one poem simply titled, "Motel." Within this final part, Titus gives readers numerous motel poems that clarify the role the motel plays for the book in relation to its overarching mathematical aspect. In "Vacant," the speaker says:
I am already black strands of hair on the flat white pillow, fingernail clippings in the sink.
A motel is the ultimate, unsolvable equation in which each piece is a variable. People constantly bring and take away pieces of themselves, both physical and emotional.
While the final section of Sum of Every Lost Ship helps unite the books individual pieces, it leaves readers with some very big questions to ponder. Most notably: what, if anything, in human life is constant?