Constance Stadler

Rummaging Through the Attic

Differentia Press, 2009

Reviewed by William Crawford



There is a plangent orchestra enwombed in the heart of Stadler’s medallion level collection of poetry, Rummaging in the Attic. Tympani explosions expose rare finds. Glissando voices sing fierce verities yet somehow manage to seem assuasive to the beguiled ear. The strings offer an empathetic valediction, then a catalytic mission statement, often in the same luculent line. Abysses receive golden bridges forged in honest flame. Eyes percolate in brilliant corners; a perfect equipoise of inlook and outlook is clearly evident. Stadler makes hot/cold discoveries, exhumes treasure maps during her search, sharply eyes star charts beneath the wizened wallpaper peeled from moldering walls. The reader senses the stripping away of frontiers, tremulous horizons waiting for elasticity tests, and other intrepid games of freedom and fire. The reader participates.

In the titular piece Stadler merges an affluence of image, pregnant with a sunlight strained through silk, natural kind of light, with feelings that bloom with wild, luminous darkness; the mirror detonates and the work sings,



“The gilded mirror,
Dissected my aspect in hair thin beam
And Amphiaraus’
shadow.

Through gutted pane.
same efflorescence of color
and fertility,

which some days soothed
and some days slayed.”


The foudroyant language is deftly tempered with an emotional honesty that is spectacular in its simplicity. The sentiment is excruciatingly exquisite. This passage, which reads not unlike a masterful chiaroscuro, becomes an eloquent emblem of the collection itself. It tells us that everything must break to be beautiful. That the same almost sensuous pain that defines bereavement, is also an essential condition of resultant renewal, in other words, birth.

This collection is a stained glass soma fountain perfectly remaking itself over and over again. In a lost era of poetry where a collective indolence has led us to a less is more mentality, with its soupçon of imagery and fear of emotional depth; Stadler offers us a viable escape, a prism rather than a prison. And with this sterling invitation comes a new challenging way to freely explore fresh, uncharted realms of light and shadow, impossible to imagine, until now.




William Crawford, author of “Fire in the Marrow” (NeoPoiesis Press, 2010) and recent Pushcart Prize nominee.