Review of Catchment Area

Catchment Area

The poems in Jena Schmitt’s debut, Catchment Area, begin, often but not always, from literary sources, lines from Bishop and Beckett, Iris Murdoch and Sappho. There are a number of ‘afters’: ‘After a Letter by Jane Austen’, ‘After “The Albatross” by Baudelaire’, ‘After “The Couriers” by Sylvia Plath’, and a tersely charming ‘misinterpretation’ of ‘The Hollow Men’:

There was a time I tried to suggest
the Shadow as a metaphor
for Death. Little did I know this
would be a longstanding debt:
death being death, and shadows
shadows. They are meant to
come and go, or fall like walls
around us when we least expect it.

Schmitt’s poems respond to her reading, but always with tongue firmly in cheek. She is a thoughtful poet, and her poems tend towards ideas rather than situations, with little room for drama (although the tongue-in-cheek tone hints, perhaps, at melodrama). In this, Anne Carson is here, too (alongside Dickinson and, perhaps, Kay Ryan, formally), her academic inflections coming through in Schmitt’s own use of overly plugged-in words such as ‘absence’, ‘longing’ and ‘loss’.


— Evan Jones PN Review

More Reviews of this title

Catchment Area

There are two main ways that people give directions: in the first, you mentally rise above the city blocks for a bird’s-eye view, then chart the path. In the other, you stay on the ground and push through, step by step. If Skibsrud’s book adopts the first method, Jena Schmitt’s poetry collection, Catchment Area, takes the second, and while the second is supposedly less efficient and more encumbered, in poetry it has its advantages. Schmitt’s fifty-nine, mostly single-page poems are physical, dense, and excursive, yet held taut by an exacting intelligence. Shrewd, restless, reflective, they gather the hard detail of the vistas of travel, friendship, and reading—poems are lit from lines by Samuel Beckett to Murakami to Sappho—for evidence of occurrence.

Schmitt’s persisting concern is the continual dissolution of place. In “Points of Vanishing,” she writes that “the landscape / becomes dated as soon as the first / line is drawn” and speaks of “geography sensitive / to the slightest breath.” In “After a letter by Jane Austen,” she asks,?“Aren’t we / all sojourners in a strange / land, fated by a place / both realised and yet to be, // familiar yet misplaced.” The question is not unlike Skibsrud’s, and there are real intersections between the two women’s work: light pretends timelessness, certainty only hovers then vanishes, loss confounds with its relentlessness, its lack of finality.

“An absence cannot be mapped,” Schmitt notes in the book’s eponymous poem; any evidence only points to “what remains and what is missing.” In the prose poem “Pinpoints,” she writes, “Wherever you go, you always leave something behind.” She means nothing comfortingly tangible, only the (elusive) fact of our having been somewhere. “Objects and places might disappear into the air, but not without notice...Like us, a city makes up its own mind about when and where to change directions. Without landmarks to guide you, try looking for fire escapes, street lamps, stained-glass windows, clotheslines, telephone poles.” That which we consider the furniture of our lives is in fact flotsam and accessory, no more comforting than memory.?“Memory roots itself / for a short time, discretely,” Schmitt writes in “Point of Vanishing.” It’s all we get. That, and some small words:

What little?
consolation in

the words there,?
there, yet we

cling to them
?like boats tossed

about a violent?
horizon, too

far to be found,
?and too late.
?(“This Evening”)

A wonder of Schmitt’s poems is her slant imagery. Endings escape cloying summation, darting off, instead, eccentrically—uniquely perceptive—as if to echo in a room beside the poem, where the poem’s absence constructed itself as the poem was being written. In the lovely “Lament at the End of Summer,” she concludes, “Days like these— / they give themselves away. And we…wait for their confession: that the light / was taken, jewel-like from the trees. // How still it was, so close to willing.” A wonderful idea and a desperate hope, that light should have a will. Schmitt knows just how much light to let in. She knows the gentleness of stanza breaks and white space as well as how to pack words closely so that they carry weight and movement. “If words lacked apertures, acute / angles would break the horizon / into pieces like a cup hitting the wall,” she declares in “Point of Vanishing.”


— Sara Cassidy The Malahat Review

Catchment Area

As Octavio Paz observes (in his essay "What Does Poetry Name?") "The meaning does not reside outside the poem but within it, no in what the words say, but in what they say to each other." Jena Schmitt's work is set on these sights. And although what is intended to be allusive in these poems can be tantalizingly elusive, meaning flickers, comes close to vanishing, then lights the sky with something deeply felt, which roots itself in the reader's sensibilities.

In these gently didactic poems, Schmitt tells us again and again to imagine: "In a case like this, close your eyes. Imagine it" (Time Reversals"). She bids us "Look away, then / see what you might not otherwise" ("Sappho's Fortune"). She tells us, "Like the night sky you will have to retrace your steps eventually" ("Pinpoints"). And to "Pay attention to rainstorms, a lover's sigh, a train passing" ("Quiescence"). With attention to metaphor, simile, and allusion, Jena Schmitt has assembled a collection full of observation and regret, and one in which she practices what she preaches--imagining.

The sureness of tone, skewed to instruct, becomes arresting. In "The Restoration," following a line from an unpublished poem by Elizabeth Bishop ("Imagine restoring the night intact like that") the poet envisions night exchanging names with day, becoming "heavy as a limestone tomb" where dreams are "hidden in floorboards." "Imagine / night fell // but the fall was too // great. So often / the heart stops, the body // tries to escape."

The vivid language of Schmitt's poems can stop readers in their tracks. Abstract nouns are dressed in images, where time 'corners the present / in the past like an animal" ("After an Unfinished Poem by Anna Akmatova"), and memory is "buried like a bulb in autumn" ("Point of Vanishing"). In the balance between celebration and lamentation, the poems more frequently treat loss and threat, such as in the elegiac warning, "We are in a state of falling / like sunlight / against the gold- / domed sky" ("The Golden Mosque"), and "Even the leaves // tremble at the thought of falling" ("Lament at the End of Summer").

In this debut collection, both lyrical and meditative, most poems are freely versed, but Schmitt does include a variation on the palindrome ("Winter Storm") as well as a number of prose poems, which are among the most successful in the book. A prose poem is difficult to do well--after all, what distinguishes it from plain prose and allows it to be called a poem? It's all in the language, its rhythm, its intonation, its sound.

In the title poem ("Catchment Area") the notion of loss is central: with the naming of things (such as jade bracelets, figs) that "clutter a table," we see what gathers together, taking "the place where someone else might wriest" and how they "show you what remains and what is missing." A delicate sketch, in only seven lines. In another poem, "Landscape with the Sound of Wind," a monarch is "close to lifeless" with the wind "giving her another life." It, too, is a lamentation, but one not devoid of hope, the funereal setting here being the field, "wide open and full of the wind's musicians, leaves / like rattles and tambourines to chide and accompany / what was left." Lifted by the wind, "a chance to live / again. Imagine: the monarch was dead, wings crushed, / neck broken, yet there she was, defiant . . . So this was how it was supposed to end. / The crowded tamaracks looking down on us, shaking / their weary heads."

Schmitt is comfortable with risk in her work, buoyed on the passion of language and an unwavering attention to what the words say to each other.


— Barbara Myers Arc Poetry Magazine

Catchment Area

Jena Schmitt, whose first published poem appears in The Fiddlehead, takes the Don't Stop A-Rockin' prize for her elegant, unusual 'Quiescence,' a neurotically beautiful examination of the ways in which 'meanings . . . change without notice.'


The Globe and Mail

Catchment Area

Sault Ste. Marie poet Jena Schmitt draws from a collection of myth, paintings, writings and natural disasters in her ambitious debut, Catchment Area.

Questing for a subject that 'cannot be mapped,' Schmitt's poems are concerned with distances, lostness, the elusive displacements of memory and dreams: 'when I try to scream/there is a dark hole where/my mouth should be.'

There is an intensity to Schmitt's work that is persistent, driven. Her poems are filled with rupture -- walls ready to be pushed over, ground on the brink of fissure, light through glass shattering.

Running in one long, unbroken read between spare lyric and prose poem, Catchment Area traces absence with precision and openness, in the space between stars, shifting fault lines, changing meridians, folded-up paintings, shadows, upheavals and unfinished poems: 'There is a period of stillness before and after a disaster, sometimes not felt at all. In a case like this, close your eyes. Imagine it.'


Winnipeg Free Press

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