SAVANNAH BROWN ‘Sweetdark’ REVIEW
Savannah Brown, once singularly an internet poet, now with novelist appendage, takes her second collection of poetry and becomes a fully-fledged existentialist. Sweetdark is modern and expansive. It ponders the cosmos, the self and the end of them both. Brown threw herself into the literary sphere at the age of nineteen, self publishing her first poetry collection Graffiti and other poems. Where it was dubbed a mature contemplation on the wranglings of coming of age, its sister Sweetdark is pleasantly present.These thirty-four new poems are split into three sections, dividing themes surrounding the void, growth, relationships and the apocalypse. As with any poetry collection, Brown’s work could go one of two ways — either stifling or breeding an ecosystem of semantic fields. Sweetdark makes you want to make notes in the margins
The godlessness in Brown’s world is omnipresent. Her opening poem ‘void/you’ is a direct comparison between near drowning in the ocean as a young child and the same feeling in her own existential drowning two decades later. Despite her watery “wade into the dark”, Brown balances the initial syllable of her collection’s title easily; the delicate nothing of life is a sweetness. ‘The universe may stop expanding in five billion years’ talks of the ache that partners normality and how, at the end of the world, there will be nothing but a longing for an anonymous sunny Sunday in June. In rejecting a deus, Brown lets herself fill the role in ‘if I ever made anything beautiful’, ‘growing thing’ and ‘ego’ as she looks for god and finds rubble, “accepts prayers till lunch” and, most explicitly, “acts god to dependent plants”. Her drunken confessions in ‘trick of the black light’ talk of a streetlamp halo which sees new dewy dawn. Towards the end of the collection, the quiet acceptance in ‘on the last day I can’t help’ speaks into a misguided excitement where a “light bulb yawns unobserved” at the end of existence.
With every word of Brown’s darkness there is a sunrise. Whilst confronted with the betrayal that “even the sun wants us dead” in ‘the parakeets which fly in greenwich park’, she hones in on the connectivity of it all “so worried about belonging when we’re all tangled in the celestial root”. She pulls a wide berth of references to her literary predecessors around her poetry. Charles Fort lingers in a noting of his Super-sargasso sea and in Brown’s “forget everything i said / it’s all wrong / don’t trust a lick of it” echoing Fort’s own deprecation of “I don’t believe anything I have written”. From the lost dimensions of the ocean to the dizzying heights of the astral plane, ‘I want you to look at the moon’ samples only snippets of conversation spoken by astronauts on the Apollo missions. There are times, too, which Brown revamps her own work. ‘folie a deux’ is a melded version of her 2017 performance piece ‘madness of two’. It then was given the brief description of narrating an abusive relationship. It, with its drawn curtains and stifling shutting out of the world contrasts loudly with the eyes which also close tight, not with violence but with pleasure in ‘the universe may stop expanding in five billion years’.
Brown observes richly from her ivory poet’s tower. ‘View including cable cars’ converts imagined possibility into imagined realities as the poet pours her coffee whilst the cable cars below her drop into the river below. She feels nothing of it. Contrastingly, ‘ego’ and ‘me barefaced in the sycamore’ expose her uncomfortably close dissection of herself and her need for beauty and purpose. In the midst of existentialism and philosophical dappling lie Brown’s blatant love poems. Where ‘rarities’ and ‘impact’ frame relationships as withheld miniature collectables, ‘me, covered in ash’, ‘earthly delights’ and even ‘autopsy, performed gasping’ hold such bursts of desperately poignant sweetness. Brown paints many ways of loving, through untangling a branch from hair, in the “white hot stars” of eros or in a defiant routine “keep on loving like this, do it, see if I care”.
The final poem in the collection ‘Memory’ wants a legacy, voicing the quiet hope of timeless impact. It is all a bit tongue in cheek. Brown is happy to poke fun at herself and in this, the darkness she faces is more an unsightly friend than villainous stranger. ‘I’m past the point of thinking growth and up and up act, more forward and back’ she theories in ‘spring of the body’. She is wise in her unknowing and funny in her despair. Each poem, summer drenched and apocalypse rearing, has its place. Sweetdark, should not be drunk down in one but savoured.
