The Hermit shows us Laura Solomon’s self-reflexive speaker, a poet who has lived much of her life sending more love letters to the world than she has received from it. In poem after poem of her third book, the poet-speaker illustrates the loneliness, anxiety, and doubt she has endured while living through words, whose meanings have weathered time. The problem she has had, we imagine, is with written language itself—“in the dream you are becoming / don’t become just words / one more person for whom love prefers / words to other people” (“Dream Ear III”). It seems the words she inks from memory cannot stay fixed. Even though remembered experience does not yellow like paper, it undergoes significant alterations—people change into shadows of their former selves, cities decay and get restored and decay again, and places once important to us drift into our peripheries. We imagine that another problem she has must be with the slipperiness of written language, its phenomenological deficiencies. Particular experience falls through the gaps left between the sentences she writes. As with infatuation, the good feeling that surges through us while in the flow of writing is short-lived. We each know something about how this goes, but most of us shrug when we ask ourselves how a poet might express such frustration. Solomon does so by writing poems that get at how her romantic relationship with the world—its people, places, things and valences—has matured and, as a result, taken up a more realistic position regarding written language and its possibilities. Continue reading “The Hermit”