HOOD of
BONE REVIEW
"and I set off again / looking more closely": A Review of Lisa Fishman's One Big Time
Reviewed by Allie Hoback
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Now five years and some change from the beginning of the pandemic, March 2020, and it still feels like I have nothing to say about it. Or rather, that despite the fear and uncertainty, I sheepishly look back and manage a fondness for those several weeks when I was given permission to live slowly, to experience time in a way that was unattached to routine, structure, and expectation. But I know this isn't a correct memory: I keenly sought out ways to give my life schedule and pattern. Nothing worked, though I baked the banana bread, bought roller skates I never used, tried and failed to follow YouTube workout regimes. However, what did stick and help me along were small proximities to nature. Especially while trapped all alone in my small, shitty Syracuse apartment. Open windows, walks in Thornden park, looking closely at flowers and trees as they bloomed into spring. Patterns and cycles were there all along for me to notice if I looked more closely— if I was willing to set aside enough worry to be present.
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Lisa Fishman's One Big Time explores the magic of what's available under certain conditions. Sometimes an island is visible in the distance, sometimes not. Sometimes you can see the distinct layers in the rock, sometimes not.
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The poems in this collection records a fourteen-day kayak trip in Northern Ontario during quarantine. Fishman serves as our nature correspondent, reporting on the observational delight and holding "every detail, one by one" as she witnesses.
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For Fishman, there is no need to know about everything in the natural world or get the language right— "All the different kinds of moss have names / but of course they really don't," and "on this side the water's called something / on that side the water's called something else." To be in nature is not to have all the answers or wisdom, but to privilege discovery. Fishman writes of a conversation with a local: "can birches live that long / or grow that fast / I ask the guy who lives here / & he says they just grow". Earlier in her trip, she writes of the joy of being fully present in the body— ignoring time and all else— just pure experience: "Not really knowing / what day it is, utopian / swimming in a light rain. There is ease in the release of the simply experiential; finding meaning just in the act of being alive.
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Nature might not teach us the names we've decided to give it, or specific technical information, but it does illuminate other things to us:
"Outside,
You can feel yourself thinking
a poem might be possible
As if it's actually wildlife
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I used to think it was eros
but no shoes gets you closer
than no clothes"
Moments of sustained interiority land beautifully in these poems— I enjoyed seeing Fishman work towards her own understanding of her creative center; how to get "closer" to a poem. In particular, how that creative center can transform or develop throughout one's writing life.
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Nature also seems to give us our metaphors. Navigating the landscape, Fishman writes: "it seemed I kept ending up in / the same place / even tho that makes no sense at all". Ending up in the same place: Patterns, the changing unchangedness of nature— "a shift in the medium (element) / repeats the pattern". Are some cycles so bad when it's all around in the natural world? And perhaps one of my favorite lines: "... as if having a map / can change what happens". Why do we want so badly to control our course, our experience, our lives? Is there something there that's only available to us once we stop fighting the flow?
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Fishman asks us to let go; to release into an experience. Or maybe, more simply, to get comfortable with just being, no matter if you know where you are or exactly what it means, if anything at all. She observes of herself: "I notice not being tempted / to say so what".
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I found it impossible to not be outside while reading One Big Time, listening for the birds whose names I don't know. I wanted to be alone with words and wind. But of course, to be totally alone is a little impossible— shouts from neighborhood kids, clinks of pots and pans from a neighbor cooking with the windows open. Like how for Fishman, even out in the wilderness, she still encounters others; thinks of her sister, of her gone father. Textures and patterns in our lives that repeat, change, repeat. At the end of the journey, Fishman turns towards the instructive. She asks us to see, look, find. The final two lines: off you go / (into the boat & head north)". I feel Fishman has given me the tools and reassurance to do so. I gladly go forth.
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One Big Time. By Lisa Fishman. Seattle: Wave Books, 2025. 64pp. $20.00.
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