APOCALYPSING
Apocalypsing by M. Elizabeth Scott
Review by Jack Schaaf
In Apocalypsing, M. Elizabeth Scott’s visions hum with heat: the organic heat of the flame flower’s sleep, the biological heat of bacterial growth, the liberating heat of apocalyptic flame. Her poems bask in the heat of the luminous and dread the silent dark.
The opening poem, titled “Apocalypsing,” picks up mid-process: “And the nasturtiums, hot with sleep,” as if a flower could glow by the force of its own dreaming. The apartment remains “dark as possible,” a sealed chamber. This apocalypse leaves behind forms, but granulates color out of existence, “like light in a sieve.”
In “Ages of Man, Phalanxed,” the heat deepens into a historical presence, the “heat-grown” bacteria in its cradle. Infancy: the First Age of Man, microbial beginnings. The speaker senses a “Bacchic longing,” not for hot, intoxicated flesh, but “for a Bronze Age cairn,” cold and lasting matter in which the tripartite Ages commingle.
Scott’s Inverness is more than a place: it is a palimpsest. See the ceremonial procession of its past beneath its modern economic growth. Its violence preserved, the highlands issued forth from a claustrophobic womb.
The prefiguring of the apocalypse finds its shape in “Dialect Continuum.” Scott envisions a fire that will “loose the claw / of burden, loose the hold / of industry.” What will result is a surreal fragility, “night and glass,” “soft chains,” “dented music,” a binding and breaking of spirit and matter.
Apocalypsing is a cumulative memory of a world of blood and flowers. It is history and mythology melting into a prophecy, threatening to flicker into a flame.
Apocalypsing by M. Elizabeth Scott was published by blush in 2023.