#250: HOLA!—II.  Years ago, during our respective Wanderjahre, a poet-friend, Joyce Rankin, said to me, “Do you find your emotions are closer to the surface when you’re traveling?”  Damned straight, woman.  When you’re away from the familiar (and this was before the universal arrival of cell-phones—home follows you around much more insistently now), with your usual safety nets out from under you, no permanent job, so much money and no more, yes, emotions pop up on you with unusual sharpness—fears, satisfactions, wonderments, uncertainties, all can have a walloping vividness.  One trick, in retrospect, is not to turn the times into personal myth, to avoid denying the strangeness, the loneliness, the dead ends and dark alleys. 

       Joy Sullivan, in her first collection of poems, Instructions for Traveling West (Dial Press, 2024) gets all that down bravely, neatly, with endless invention.  There’s some hinted bits of autobiography behind it and structuring it—dumping a relationship and, basically, getting the hell out of Dodge, heading, eventually, for Oregon—but she keeps it just visible enough, rather than plastering it all over the page.  She has other things in mind: evoking, with terrific invention, what she encounters on the road, and what she personally brings along with her by way of guts and kindness.  She says, in the book’s proem, “You must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living”—that’s what she’s got in mind.  Late in the collection, there are a few pieces that hint at what all this cost her, but only after there are pages and pages of what it gained her. One of the most remarkable things in the book—and that’s not to mention the extraordinarily practiced and lively use of language—is the many instances of connection: the gas station cashier who says “Go Buckeyes” when told Sullivan’s coming from Ohio; a diner cook who carries her wood and shows her how to build a fire.  She can go off on some glorious tangents: a few poems in the voice of Eve, and “William Shatner in Outer Space” (“What weightless William saw was a planet impossible and spun, unhinged in a galaxy, a speck imbued with blue, shock of language fraying at the seams.”).  It’s a tough and joyous book:  Sullivan strikes me as the true American daughter of Lucinda Matlock (“What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, / Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?”), without the scolding and with a sense of humor and a honey-loving tongue full of metaphors.  From her proem:

                        Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands.

                        Bear beauty for as long as you are able and if you spot

                        a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself—

                        joy is not a trick.