“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
—Maya Angelou

When it comes to matters of the heart, all of us have secrets. Most of us have regrets. The way we choose to accommodate our contradictory truths, along with how we reveal the disparate pieces of ourselves and our uniquely remembered stories, differs from person to person. In R.L. Farr’s Become Echo, her debut-full length collection of poems (Atmosphere Press, 2023), the artful depiction of two lovers and their past relationship is not simply an effort to put to rest a painful chapter so much as a broader testament to the power of desire to continually shape a life.

In this carefully wrought collection, devastation is the point. 

In “I Ask for Nothing Less Than Disaster,” Farr writes:

If there is life after calamity, let it fall away.
Not like pebbles scatter down a mountainside

but landslide, deafening and vast. Let shadow
pierce the face of it. Trouble sleepers from their rest.

Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This is not exactly breaking news; the subjects of grief and loss play out in poetry every day. However, what intrigued me most about Farr’s collection, which unfolds in three sections, initium, medietas and postea—Latin for beginning, middle, and end—is her artful presentation of the lovers and their situation, which evolves through a canvas of juxtaposed ideas and images that acknowledge time’s chronological passage while simultaneously questioning the myth of healing. Despite the allure of the myth, time, in Farr’s work, does not heal all wounds.

In her 55 poems, Farr sets the ordinary against the sublime and predictable timetables against unpredictable passion. She frequently contrasts the spoken with the unspoken, hunger with satiety, and bleakness with iridescence. Observations she makes about the natural world add parallel dimensions of loss while offering flashes of radiance one might interpret as the poet’s determination to find beauty and mystery in her environment.

We feel the insistence of desire and its transcendence over time in “Past, As it Lingers”:

It’s not the waiting
that wants satisfaction.
It’s the     wanting.
The heated rush of blood
that carries the ache,
to find home.
Then     the falling.
Your silhouette slips
into deep crevasses of shadow,
passes through light &
memory.Where bodies
dissolve.Where walls
& windows fail. Where
the unwearied past,
its lingering, its haunting,
summons, persistent &
urgent.

Farr knows there’s no such thing as closure, and understands that certain memories of time spent with her lover are indelibly imprinted on her psyche. In “Thistle Tea,” she paints herself out of the picture, telling herself she is now absent from the scenes she resurrects. Yet despite the sweetness of certain recollections, she recognizes that what she is really holding onto is not the relationship as much as it is her own fear of forgetting and the loss of language itself. What is unsaid is as important as what is said, and is as important as what will forever be missing: the ability to adequately portray the physical and emotional impacts within us well after trauma or disaster or heartbreak.

From “Thistle Tea”:

Still, I know the taste of your city. Its redolent sweetness remains
though I have been absent these years. How is it yearning lingers
longest on the tongue and of the senses most resonant of pain?
Poor, beleaguered logic. What is desired most is forbidden. Yet,

the days, each after each, are recollections in grand detail, savors
imprinted and cellular. Long-suffering ghosts. They are haunting
with the ferocity of dying. Which is fear of forgetting. Which is
slipping from the tongue. Which is this lexicon of communication

lost. And in this losing, what pleasures are denied. I am surrounded
by plenty: laden orchard, ample gardens, preserves, chutneys,
syrups, batters, doughs. Savory, your world in my remembering,
pungent, the crowd of houses spilling into the other. Sharp, the din

of vendors’ calls. Street markets, a sensorium, for our hunger.
These remain. We do not. And in this undoing, I am starving.

We never quite know who the lovers were to each other, what the nature of the relationship’s ending was, or who they are when they’re away from each other. Yet with masterful detachment, Farr manages to capture the lovers’ elusiveness and the transitory nature of their affair, using carefully controlled language that brings the lovers’ shape to life through a technique not unlike that of a painter who makes strategic use of negative space to heighten unknowns. 

In Farr’s poems, the airy lineation she often uses—varying line length to create a sense of stopping and starting, movement versus stagnation—adds to the deliberate way in which the poet holds back what we think we need to know, and yet ultimately convinces us to trust her that, no, maybe we don’t need to know everything. Or maybe what we need to know is not what we think .

In “The Inevitability of Parting,” once again we experience the lovers’ desire as a potent undercurrent, with words they share, or don’t share, hinting at their inability to accept the reality of their circumstances:  

Adamant as train timetables,
taxi meters,
the force that brings
us together

is timed to undo.

Our bodies converge,
fiercely
coupled against
the uncoupling
that waits

promises to be certain.

In several poems in Become Echo, fruit plays a role in heightening the sensuality of the environments the lovers find themselves in. In “The Weight of Pears,” pears become a metaphor for body science in the male lover’s Manhattan apartment where they meet for their rendezvous:

We choose our words like we choose this morning’s pears.

And later in the same poem:

The unsaid waits.
Yet never of the other
desires. Those the body’s
science urges

toward completion.
The core remains.
We’ve pressed
our thumbs

into the flesh,
tested its initial reluctance
to surrender the blush
ripeness to the hand.

What kept my senses primed and my brain stimulated throughout my reading of Become Echo was Farr’s intentional interspersion of animals and landscapes rendered as a colorful counterpoint to the lovers’ monochromatic environment, specifically the cold, bleak winters described when the lovers connect in the city. Birds, foxes and koi make intermittent appearances, with three short, separate koi pond poems—one in each section—all offering additional perspective and context for the work as a whole.

In “Old Koi Pond: Impression,” from the first section, the koi flash us back to the dilemma of language faced by the lovers, whose struggle to put words to their passion and its meaning are one of the first things we learn about them:

Still they swim, light radiant
bodies. They curve
into brief commas,
un-comma

again.

In “Dream of Foxes,” the speaker is driving through the mountains and considers the mountain fox:

Born to bleakness,
burrowed in a hollow between heaves of shale.
Hollow as the place at the base of your throat.
Vulnerable, where words form.

Again and again while reading, I turned back to the book’s cover, a painting by Jeanie Tomanek titled “I Read the News Today.” In the painting, a female figure with bone-colored flesh and a featureless face is a focal point that is contrasted against a dark purple shadow and other abstract forms in vivid colors. Farr’s choice of this painting for the cover of Become Echo felt perfect to me, in the way she makes use of the same chiaroscuro-like technique to limn the lovers’ story and her ongoing themes.

I found the book’s title in the last line of “Canyon Wall as Raison D’Etre,” the first poem in the second section, where Farr’s speaker reminds us that words desperate to be voiced, but held back, occupy both power and potential. For what, we cannot know, but can surely sense. Whether or not those words are ever spoken, they’ll exist as unintended consequences: as regret, or as reverberations that carve impacts into the selves the lovers carry forward. 

If our mouths cry love,

We free-
fall

Become echo.

What is an echo but a resonance? Relationships may end, at least in one dimension, but Farr’s goal in this collection seems to be to render not the particulars of what the lovers were to each other—what was said when, and why, or what caused the break-up—but rather to conjure and characterize the pervasive ghost of longing that still visits, with its echoes of mortality and the life cycles of love and grief. 

Note: The Maya Angelou quote is from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Random House, 1969

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