George Myers Jr. reviews Kathryn Rantala’s book “Translated from the English”
Translated from the English, poems by Kathryn Rantala. (Sandy Press)
The geography of Kathryn Rantala’s remarkable book comes into focus quickly. The poems gather into three increasingly ambitious sections — “Exploration & Study,” “Letters North,” and “As if they were a Basket.” Each section rewards attention. Still, the final third feels especially rich. It’s there that the book’s structural intelligence comes fully into view.
In “As if they were a Basket,” Rantala wagers that adjacency can carry meaning without narrative scaffolding, that structure itself can generate coherence.
This isn’t literary collage. Collage works through visible discontinuity: fragments placed beside one another, often sharply dissonant, their meaning emerging through contrast. Pound’s documentary inserts come to mind, or the modernist cut-and-paste method where energy comes from fracture. Rantala moves differently. Her adjacency feels quieter and more patient. The elements don’t collide so much as lean toward one another. Her repeated “as” constructions align rather than splice. If collage cuts and recombines, Rantala weaves.
The basket metaphor helps clarify the distinction. Collage tends to preserve the edges of its parts. Weaving interlaces them. Tension spreads across crossings. No single strand dominates. Meaning gathers gradually through relation rather than rupture, through structure rather than plot or speaker. Collage suggests meaning can emerge from fragments. Rantala shows how meaning can emerge from crossings.
The “Basket” section works because those crossings feel deliberate and carefully felt. Repeated likeness constructions, analytic vocabulary, and a visible compositional method create structural integrity. The basket isn’t decorative; it’s enacted. The poems hold themselves through tension at their joins, and that tension generates meaning.
Even the title carries a quiet hypothesis. “As if” proposes a model rather than a claim. The section asks what happens when experience is held as a basket rather than narrated as a line. That shift carries historical weight. Much of the Western lyric tradition gathers around a speaking self; even fragmented forms usually orbit voice. Rantala gently resists that center. Her comparisons feel less like metaphor than experiments in relation. Objects stand beside one another without being absorbed.
You can hear faint echoes of objectivist poetics here — not doctrinally, but in the attention to objects as fields of perception. Like Oppen or Niedecker, Rantala distrusts grand synthesis. The basket doesn’t unify its contents; it holds them in tension. Her embedded annotations and methodological language reinforce that stance. References to abstraction, duration, matching figures, and information extraction introduce the vocabulary of study and fieldwork into lyric space. Composition becomes visible. The old illusion of spontaneous emergence quietly recedes.
There’s precedent for this in modernist documentary practice, yet Rantala’s tone remains restrained. The poems enact their method rather than announce it.
Emotion still moves through the work, though it appears in material and structural forms. Weariness arrives as weather; vulnerability appears as angle or duration. At times this cools the immediate surface of the poems, though the restraint feels deliberate rather than withholding. Feeling becomes another strand in the weave rather than its organizing center.
Across Translated from the English, taxonomic thinking offers a wider frame. Earlier poems gesture toward systematics and study. In the “Basket” section, classification shifts into adjacency rather than hierarchy. Landscape appears not as scenery but as relational field. The work enters the conversation of late-twentieth-century eco-poetics, though quietly, without overt argument. Perception moves ecologically, through crossings.
Duration becomes the book’s quiet hinge. When the poems invoke duration, they frame structure as time-bound rather than transcendent. A weave holds — for a time. That awareness introduces a subtle ethical dimension: the refusal to claim permanence or final authority. Rantala borrows analytic language but resists totalizing conclusions. The structure remains visible, provisional, constructed.
Formally, the repeated “as” constructions accumulate rather than resolve. Crossing follows crossing, layer after layer. No strand claims authority. Transparency and opacity stay in balance. The method remains visible, yet the poems don’t over-explain their stakes. The reader helps hold the weave.
If “Letters North” charts movement and interruption — roads blocked, directions surveyed — “As if they were a Basket” explores containment and relation. It cares less about direction than arrangement. Historically aware, formally controlled, and structurally consistent, the section succeeds on its own terms. It doesn’t chase lyric sweep or emotional crescendo. Instead, it builds a relational architecture.
The measure of the section is simple: does the weave hold?
Here, it does.
