Someone once noted that the world of childhood ends when one of two things happen. When we become aware of the presence of evil in the world. Or when we develop the ability to reflect honestly and with some degree of intelligence on the past. Both of those lines of demarcation can be clearly observed in Erin Carlyle’s new poetry collection, Girl at the End of the World (Driftwood Press 2024).
Someone else once said that dealing with the past can be like unpacking dirty clothes from a vacation that did not go as planned. That comment too helps frame a discussion of Carlyle’s book.
As the title suggests, there is an apocalyptic dimension to the poems here. At the outset, one wonders if readers will find a Yeatsian vision of a limbo state between one world dead and another struggling to be born, or perhaps something else.
A fitting place to begin satisfying that curiosity is not at the beginning of the book but with a poem nearly two-thirds of the way through it. In the third of three sections into which she divides her poems, we find Carlyle’s proclamation: “I am a girl at the end / of the world” in a poem titled “End of the World.” Interestingly, Carlyle lends the same title to four of the poems in that section, including one that begins:
I’m sitting at a bus stop, waiting
to get a lift
to some other plane
of existence.
Collectively, these four poems comprise a mosaic of the book’s unifying theme of a survivor’s attempt to make sense of the past.
Returning to the beginning, we find more than a mosaic. In the first section of the book, Carlyle takes us page by page through an unabashed psychological scrapbook of her childhood. This is not the world of Barbies, news bikes for Christmas, and easy-bake ovens. Poems in this section are filled with images of ominous strangers luring little girls into their cars, tornados, poverty, shoplifting, and a family constantly on the move from one rented house to another,
Clearly, the dominant presence in the world of Carlyle’s girl is her father, a long-haul truckdriver who died from an opioid overdose. His spirit visits her in poems such as “My Father Syphons Gas,” which concludes this way:
I see myself under a crocheted blanket
in the front seat, careful not to move,
or make any more sound,
and my father out there slinking
in the night—poor thief
in search of fuel, and then filling
his mouth with gasoline.
And “Opioid Crisis,” in which we learn the cause for his tragic end:
He dug holes in the land
and he
hauled goods long distances
until his heart gave out.
The doctor pulled it out of his chest
and he couldn’t do anything
anymore,
had to
take pills from orange bottles.
And most dramatically in the long fragmented poem “Daddy Dream Suite.” In that surreal meditation, the world which has come to an end is life with her father, who “shimmers in / and out of existence” and who has “gone / somewhere— absent of light or somewhere / he can manifest / as dark, hot hands reaching out.”
For Carlyle the poet, the challenge is to come to terms with this ghost by ferreting through the child’s complex of love and disdain, fondness and shame with regards to a negligent parent. That ambivalence can be seen by returning to the poem “My Father Syphons Gas,” about an obvious crime but in which she refers to the father as a “poor thief / in search of fuel.” And in the poem “I Saw a News Story,” about three girls caught in the act of shoplifting, Carlyle reveals more than familial kinship with her father: “Wanting is not a crime. At sixteen, I would steal / anything I could,” she confesses. And later:
At least I come by stealing honestly. My father
took things from the neighbor’s
yards to sell. He took
gas from their cars, even took
money from my grandmother’s purse. Stealing
is my birthright.
A strong supporting cast in this drama includes Carlyle’s mother, who seems to have been a victim of addiction herself, a younger brother, and a number of childhood friends and acquaintances.
But the central character is clearly Carlyle herself, who — as memory always dictates — must play two roles: the girl she was then and the adult she is now trying to make sense of her past…and by extension to move on from it. The raw material she has to work with, though, does not present itself in whole bolts of fabric or Butterick patterns. Instead, it comes to her in broken bits and pieces of a ragtag life.
As the foregoing suggests, most of the poems in Carlyle’s collection are confessional in nature. She accepts the details of her life — in particular the tragic and traumatic elements — as her subject matter. Stylistically, many of the poems reflect the fragmented, unstructured nature of her upbringing. This quality is most apparent in “Daddy Dream Suite”:
When Daddy is
where I am,
he tells me the names of all the dogs
that, as a child,
he buried
in his back yard—old
regrets, and when he goes
to the other side, I hear nothing.
In the end, what new world emerges from the ruins of Carlyle’s childhood? What rough beast slouches towards her Atlanta home to be born? The answer comes in a close reading of the book’s title, Girl at the End of the World. She is at the end not beyond it, still sitting at the bus stop “waiting / to get a lift / to some other plane / of existence” but now ticketed with a newer and clearer understanding of herself. It is that well-earned sense of new identity that will perhaps provide future material for this promising poet.
Erin Carlyle
The events of Erin Carlyle’s childhood unfolded in rural Alabama and Kentucky. She now lives with her husband, two cats, and one dog in Atlanta, Georgia, where she teaches English at Georgia State University and where she is also pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing. She is the author of one previous full-length collection of poetry, Magnolia Canopy Otherworld (Driftwood Press), and one chapbook, You Spit Hills and My Body (Dancing Girl Press).
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