Melancholia (An Essay)
by Kristina Marie Darling
Ravenna Press, 2012
72 pages / $10  Buy from Ravenna Press

Parenthetically titled “An Essay,” Kristina Marie Darling’s Melancholia is a collection of prose poems, independent lines, notes, and fragments. Prose poetry and essays are not imperfect bedfellows. Samuel Johnson defined the essay form as “A loose sally of the mind: an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” His definition sounds appropriate to the form’s modern originator, 16^th century French writer Michel de Montaigne, whose works unfold as scattered meditations on words and concepts. Yet Johnson’s definition is also curiously apt as a description of contemporary prose poetry. Often lacking a central narrative, prose poems typically contain development of breadth rather than depth. Darling solves that problem by using the prose poem form to link imagistic snapshots that accumulate the work’s emotional content.

Yet Melancholia is difficult to classify. Its structural form is prose poetry, its conceptual mode is almost filmic, and its narrative mode owes much to the essay’s tendency to classify and define. Melancholia posits that a poet-narrator is a good choice to “select and omit”: Darling’s prose poems are more concerned with absence than presence, as white space outweighs text within the book. Such ratio is not shocking in a volume of poetry, but the prose poetic form reestablishes the physical page in poetry. When a poet reaches for the margins in her sentences, her later abbreviations become more obvious. Darling has a nice sense of the physical page, and Ravenna Press’s pocket series, at roughly 6 by 5 inches, is the right size for a typographically spare collection.

Darling’s complicated form mirrors her complicated content. Melancholia documents a fragmented relationship in a previous, possibly Victorian, era. Time is ambiguous in the collection: although the overarching narrative occurs in an epoch of cufflinks and corsages, the work references a “little-known French film, in which the heroine makes her living by keeping nightingales,” and another, equally obscure film, where “a woman refers to her beloved as a ‘strange machine.’” This confusion about time arises from the poet’s role as essayist. Darling’s core narrative is centered on a feuding, and later separated, couple, but she overlays that narrative with fragments of fact. Her reason for bending form is tied to her title: melancholy lacks the sharp edges of anger and sadness. It is a paradoxical feeling of heft and weightlessness, so a poet would be smart to mix poetry and fact as she struggles to understand pain.

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