“Attention” as a form of currency — the idea that it’s something that we can “pay” — has become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget that we didn’t always conceive of attentiveness as a commodity. “Attention” appears only six times in Shakespeare, and it’s never being paid although it is being lent in “Cymbeline.” The Google Book Search Ngram Viewer suggests that this long-dead metaphor didn’t come into popular usage until the late 1700s, even though now it’s practically ubiquitous.
Refreshingly, Shannon Burns’ enchanting, poignant debut poetry collection, “Oosh Boosh,” reminds the reader on practically every page that attention, too, can be a form of love, of presence, or even a game.
In the prose poem “Blue Thing Feeling,” which uses language from her father Michael Burns’ poem “We Have These Cancellations,” she writes, “One way to become spooky is to send love through your hands to a blue thing,” vivifying a preference for a color into a magical encounter that transforms the person offering the blue object attention.
In the lineated poem “To Whom Does the Sky B’long?” she writes, “I’m doing a re-enactment / of JFK’s assassination where / I just throw a rock at your head. It is / for no other reason. Why else / would I do these things?” The inappropriate game she has her speaker play seems to suggest the inherent perverseness in doing something, anything — be it this weird play-acting or even writing a poem — only for its inherent interest and pleasure as opposed to any need to be worthwhile or productive. Later, in the same poem, she writes, “My parents I think sometimes / are the tiniest people / on earth, they are so / mine,” underscoring how the regard we have for people or things can paradoxically both elevate and minimize them.
Similarly, the accomplishments she brags about in “Brags” are minor, at times profane, yet also life-affirming, including: “Now I reached under a bunch of brush / into the earth and pulled out a turtle, like / I’d always known it was there. It was / alive!”
Her epigraphs, too, invite the reader to contemplate the value of small acts of attention and expression. One is from the band Thin Lizzy: “I still don’t know what the hell is going on / Oh but I wrote this song,” and the other is “Oosh Boosh!” — something her late father said when it was cold.
The title poem, “For My Dad (Oosh Boosh),” is a lovely elegy about grief and carrying on in the wake of it. “He was a big fan of mine / and died, so I permitted / myself to go to bed at 8:05,” she begins, her casual tone and specificity emphasizing the gravity and vastness of the loss.
Throughout the book, Burns’ voice reveals itself to be funny, slangy and cool, but also sincere and classically concerned with the traditional subjects of lyric poetry: loved ones, death, nature, emotions and fleeting personal encounters — and even the joys of language itself. In “What’s the Scoop?” she takes that clichéd phrase and breathes new life into it using a string of increasingly preposterous scenarios, beginning, “Oh did you talk to Amber? / What’s the scoop! Did she / have the scoop? I’ve heard / she’s making a lot of money / these days, flying around / giving people the scoop” and ending “Today my daughter came to me / and said she had the scoop. / I kept her home from school, / but it didn’t do any good.”
Fluid, elliptical and artful, Burns’ poems are not afraid to assert the virtues of thinking hard and feeling deeply. In the poem “Apologies Can Have Exquisite Impact,” she writes, “But if you don’t mean it, you won’t find the hall in it / to the plot you knew when you were small, the place / you recreate in sleep, if you don’t mean it…”
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Exquisite indeed, as is all of “Oosh Boosh” in its intensely personal and idiosyncratically named entirety.
Kathleen Rooney is the co-editor with Eric Plattner of “Rene Magritte: Selected Writings,” to be published in September by University of Minnesota Press.
Oosh Boosh
By Shannon Burns, 421 Atlanta, 55 pages, $15