The path to book publication for “young” poets typically involves entering at least one (more often many) first book contest. The oldest, and perhaps most prestigious, of these contests is the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which began in 1919. Since then, under the banner of the series, Yale University Press has had the opportunity to introduce the world to books such as Muriel Rukeyser’s Theories of Flight, W.S. Merwin’s A Mask for Janus, John Ashbery’s Some Trees, and Carolyn Forché’s Gathering the Tribes. Although one may argue that such success has, over the years, led to scores of university and independent presses following a similar contest strategy and perhaps diluting the pool of manuscripts, no other first book contest, alas, sets for us such lofty expectations.

Doubtless, the history of the prize contains its share of critical misses, but to my mind, It Is Daylight by Arda Collins is not one of those disappointments. More, if I could convince myself that I had psychic abilities, I’d predict that, like those volumes mentioned above, this is a book we’ll be reading for decades. It creates a unique, consistent world for us to inhabit — however momentarily — that we carry with us back to our own, ever-so-slightly altered experience.

Indeed, although the landscape, and hence the setting, that suffuses the book (with shades of winter, augurs of spring) is doubtless the largely suburban miasma of our lives as it exists in the 21st century, Collins’ particular vision of that landscape has few precedents. Rather than the broad expanses of highway and shopping malls and the attendant symbols of freedom or ennui we might expect, Collins offers us a view from within the claustrophobia of existential loneliness. More, touches of surrealistic imagery and metaphor throughout the collection continually reassert the utter strangeness of this familiar landscape. Like the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads, she has taken the ordinary and shown it to be alien, perhaps, sublime.

The book opens (like any day?) with “The News”:

At last, terror has arrived.

Next door, the house has gone up in flames.

A woman runs from the burning wreck, her face smeared

with blood and ashes. She screams her children are kidnapped.

Immediately, we are thrown into the “terror” that seems to hover around the edges of the book. Collins’ unique use of double-spacing, in conjunction with the majority of the lines being end stopped, slows our reading considerably. Through form itself, Collins makes clear that this is a contemplative book and encourages us to consider carefully the seemingly direct language before us. More, the near dead-pan tone of these lines is haunting, and that sense of alienation is exacerbated by the progression of poems. Rather than acting — in some small way — as we might expect, the narrator continues with “It’s truly exciting, and what more would anyone ask? // For a rare and beautiful egg to present itself in the grass?  // For sex with the liquor store owner to progress into something meaningful?” From there, the narrator addresses a presumed reader before turning inward, describing a handful of embarrassing anecdotes of her behavior “in front of the mirror” and then imagines herself “receiv[ing] // a large and upsetting piece of news.”

The final line, despite its proximity to cliché, serves as a remarkable summation of the entire collection’s task, as the narrator asks, “Can I guess what I am thinking?  Can I tell you what it is?”

Although one may be tempted to dismiss such a poem as the worse sort of solipsism, if you continue reading you’ll realize rather quickly that that this is a poem about such solipsism and the narrator’s inability to act authentically. Indeed, as Louise Glück notes in the book’s foreword, many of the poems in this book, like “The News” are dramatic monologues, like the poems in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. Here, we have a similarly broken narrator and will follow the arc of their thought, their imagination into crevices we might otherwise be unable to tread.

Yet, Collins is no mere imitator. Indeed, while Berryman’s Dream Songs use the tension between Henry and Mr. Bones as a kind a buffer against the inevitable (and in many ways permanent) isolation of the self, the speaker throughout most of It Is Daylight looks only toward herself (and later god). Connections with others are hinted at. There’s the occasional watching of passers-by, such as the “young couple” in the poem “Garden Apartments”. Yet as the couple approaches, the speaker smells the woman’s shampoo and “feels afraid of the day.”

Throughout the first half of the book, we witness the speaker continually fearful of the day, continually pulling away from contact of any meaningful sort. In fact, near the beginning, in the poem “Pool # 3”, the speaker actually hides from an approaching ice cream man, while imagining the pictures of the ice creams:

reading the names and descriptions

of all of them, each one

shown with a bite out of it

so you can see what the inside looks like.

I would like to do this with people

so that I can see all the swimming pools inside them.

I’m hiding because I don’t want

the ice cream man to see my swimming pools.

The imagery here is at once gorgeous and horrifying, and such imagery occurs regularly in this book. More, although the title suggests a series of poems, only four are given (#3, #13, #10, and #8, in that order) suggesting that there are indeed other “pools,” yet we may only partially glimpse them, at random junctures.

Yet, as the narrative continues, the speaker does make gestures outward, and does connect, in some sense with something beyond the self. At first, as in “Letter #6”, those gestures are made toward the inanimate. In this case, the month of February:

Dear February,

I know we’ll be together again;

they can’t stop us,

why would they even want to?

The answer, perhaps, is that “they” wouldn’t. Yet, through such black humor, Collins does manage to buoy what would otherwise be an unbearably bleak book. More, as the narrative continues, Collins uses that bleakness as an opportunity for her speaker to engage god and approach, as in the poem “Heaven”, spirituality:

What did you do today?

I ask god.

God doesn’t say anything.

I don’t say anything else.

Yet even this silence serves as a dialogue for the speaker, an opening in which argument later blossoms, in which, ironically, the speaker begins to make her life authentic, and moves toward more colorful, vibrant, and spacious poems like “Parts of an Argument” and “Dawn” — regardless of whether or not the speaker believes in the entity to which she is speaking.

In short, it is an excellent book, which seems both of our time and timeless. Collins, I think, has shown us a glimpse of the existential abyss while maintaining both her sense of humor as well as a dexterous lyricism that seems, almost, to find beauty in spite of its stripped simplicity. Despite the fact that the book could, I imagine, be slightly thinner than its hefty 90 pages of poetry, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Read it now. Read it again in 40 years.

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