by Nicole Yurcaba
Occasionally, a poetry collection or chapbook arrives at exactly the right moment in one’s life. For me, Ways of Healing by British-Ukrainian poet Charlotte Shevchenko Knight arrived at a pivotal point in my 35 years on this plane as I process the end of one long-term relationship, navigate personal and professional challenges, endure the everyday news of war in my family’s homeland, and cycle through the grief of yet another significant personal loss (the details of which I am not at liberty to disclose) in my life. It should surprise none of my readers then that on a hot, humid July afternoon when the sun shone too brightly and Camouflage’s album Sensor played on repeat for a single day’s seemingly never ending hours that I picked of Ways of Healing and read through it—twice in a single afternoon.
While each of the poems in Ways of Healing bears witness to longing, loss, pain, and their remedies, “Clinic/ The Winter Self” is one of the most gripping initial pieces. Structured into three sections, the poem opens with the dramatic line “Running into the sea fully-clothed symptom.” It’s a line reminiscent of Charlotte Bronte’s 1884 poem “One Sea-Side Grave.” However, in the first section’s few lines, the poem transcends whatever stereotypical images associated with the hysteria that drives people to wade into the sea and never again look towards the shore. The speaker bluntly and honestly confesses “I am sick with wanting,” a confession that sets the tone for the poem’s remainder. In the second section, the speaker sits, post-January swim, sipping coffee, remembering “back to the clinic, paper cups atop / a water cooler bubbling with mild anger.” The speaker then poses questions like “Is depression a glitter?” and “Does my empty womb mean something?” The speaker’s questioning moves the poem and transitions it into the third section. In this section, the speaker not only shares their backstory, but they also utter one of the most beautiful lines in poetic history—”I am afraid of the ceaseless winter of myself.” This sense of endless permeates Knight’s work, which becomes even more evident in poems like “Insert Sappho Reference.”
“Insert Sappho Reference” is cyclical, experimental—an emotional tour de force primed by its lack of punctuation and capitalization as well as its play with spacing. The lack of punctuation and capitalization creates the sense of breathlessness, which from the poem’s first line—“pour wine over this white goat”—sweeps readers with wave-like force into the poem. The poem grows chaotic as declarative sentences and interrogative sentences merge and collide: “burning holes in my new purple furs / love a frenetic chasing / why do i have / four legs.” Adding a unique swirl to the poem’s chaos is the speaker’s reliance on the image of a goat, with which the speaker identifies: “is there an island for heartbroken / goats why i am i bleating.” Readers may associate the goat with some of the animal’s mythological associations, which include fertility, abundance, modesty, and a free spirit. Clinching the ending is the speaker’s tear-jerking acknowledgement:
we have all loved somebody
with the knowledge they won’t
love us back i mean i don’t get it
i am a goat why am i crying.
The style of “Insert Sappho Reference” sets a high bar for stylistically similar poems, like “Folklore,” which follow it. “Folklore” is quite, quaint, elegant. Like “Insert Sappho Reference,” it relies on a lack of punctuation and capitalization to create its flow, its rhythm. The lack of punctuation and capitalization creates the sensation of falling. The poem opens with the Eden-like lines “today the weather is holding / like an apple.” It continues flowing into a variety of sensual images where falling in love becomes synonymous with “putting a coin in your mouth / that tastes unlucky.” Pushing the poem to its full potential is the speaker’s reliance on ampersands which tightly connect statements and images and add yet another level of experimentation to the poem, which readers encounter again and again throughout Ways of Healing.
Of course, every collection or chapbook has its star poem, and while its difficult to choose just that one star poem in Knight’s work, the poem “My Heart is Being Held Hostage by the World’s Saddest Ending” might just rival all the rest for that position. Confessional and intimate, the poem bears images of “your half-face on the jubilee / line to stratford” and “wooden spoon paddling / in the grotesqueness / of ass cheeks.” These intimate details reveal much about the relationship being examined in the poem; they also act as tiny threads onto which the speaker grasps in order to retain the relationship’s memory. As the poem turns, a ritual unfolds, and the effort to which the speaker goes is communicated through a series of specific, heart-wrenching details:
i will reassemble
your daily image
thru stolen sweatshirts
grizzly bear lyrics.
The list continues, and Knight’s careful craft attests to the emotional, wrenching power word list poems carry, a skill many poets never truly master.
Ways of Healing is simultaneously tender and tough, heartbreaking and heart-healing. It establishes Knight as a fresh, new voice in poetry while embracing the feminist and ritualistic elements of poetry collections such as Karyna McGlynn’s 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. More personally, for readers like me, who are cycling through various manifestations of loss and grief—which often seem insurmountable, unceasing—Knight’s verses offer a bit of advice on a ritual that might benefit everyone of us: shape the memories into poems, and allow the healing to begin.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
