Neutral Milky Halo

Maria Sledmere
Guillemot Press

I plunge the word into the deserted emptiness: it’s word like a slim monolithic block that gives off shadow. —Clarice Lispector

The above passage casts an almost spectral shadow across Neutral Milky Halo, which exists in and between interesting spaces of a pamphlet and collection, and questions around occupied spaces are a continual thread permeating throughout. It explores pollination of ideas, born from interwoven threads of the Anthropocene...

asking me in the mausoleum of roses
why we cannot touch the roses
I am assured of your commitment to roses

...moving into an uneasy, neutral haze that emerges from distance and emptiness, trying to find a way to expression. A wavering sense of oscillating isolation captured abruptly from an ethereal (or external) presence and replenished through verse. Almost halo like remnants of dreams and reality converge as unspoken musings, eager to be remembered;

it looks like sleep. Lossy felt
around the air
a casual recitation

However, the poems from this hybrid form that stand out, go beyond in form (‘irretrievable sylvan midi’ and ‘starlight so hard’ in particular) and the longest poem ‘Flotsam’ (an amalgamation of all the underlying themes and currents) ends at an interesting crescendo, on a journey with the poet through the United States as an almost dreamlike venture: ‘imagine Disney injected/ arterial dreams’.

Even within the looming shadow of the halo circling intermittingly, there is a constant awareness and re-connection to the world. A sense of hyper awareness that overlaps in observations and commentary on petro-culture at large as well, like in Sluttish Aphrodite ‘I was no Goddess of oil’ and Flotsam ‘I go so long in the run/as to make a beach/in loops of oil/to empty my purse/of mermaids’.

The overarching resonance of the collection feels pensive and almost like a reflexive overture of current times with more to come and explore. The title poem of the book sums up and expresses the neutrality lingering in the air;

Some of the halos
are not even milky
I mean they are more like water
sometimes you pull them clear
of their heads, so pretty
but otherwise neutral

This is a well-orchestrated collection that kept me invested throughout. a wonderful new addition to an impressive and expanding body of work from the poet.

—Shehzar Doja