Contributor’s Marginalia: Laura Sobbott Ross on “The Dress-Lamp Tree” by Anya Silver

It was the whimsical musicality of the poem “The Dress-Lamp Tree” that drew me in. It delights in the way someone hurried takes a short-cut down a gray city street then stops to admire a spring carnival. This poem, inspired by a photograph by Tim Walker, is flounce and lantern and heady silhouette. I say flounce instead of flutter because of what it accomplishes in just fourteen lines. I say lantern instead of electric because of the old-fashioned phrases like “party dresses” and “shuttered ballrooms,” putting me in the mindset of a Saturday afternoon matinee with a box of lemon drops. Did someone say swizzle stick? Stroll? Croquet?

Despite its buoyancy, there are elemental images in the poem that ground its sugar-spun frivolity. After all, the dresses, twelve of them, are strung out of reach among the gristle of leaf and bark. An incandescent display that has us looking up from “the earth, the too solid earth” on a night when the speaker what-ifs a dress to waft down across her naked skin, to slide over her shoulder blades in a giddy benediction. It is notable that she allows the dress to do the choosing. The floating her away. The transforming.

On a foundational level, I love the piecings of the dresses—“bell-skirted, ruffled, pouf-sleeved.” It gives symmetry to the airiness of the images. One can imagine a pattern being assimilated into a confection by someone who can still say bodice and cuff while holding a line of straight pins between her teeth. And the colors! Anya Silver was known for her astute use of color in her poetry. She paints so deftly that you breathe the brushstrokes rather than just witness them. Chiffony pastels spooned over a bare bulbed glow like “underworld princesses” is how she describes the dresses. Persephonesque. Not just fruit or flower, but all that froths and pearls to juju up the endearing and enduring hopefulness of spring. Or any new season, for that matter.

Once the speaker has become ensconced by the dress, she imagines herself adrift—as if those of us still looking up would see only the soles of her shoes and the stars limned through her voluminous skirts. Even her hair is a current shaken loose. She’s young again, she tells us, moony and swoony and delicious, her “throat long and taut like a stem.” And she doesn’t belt out what has suddenly come back to her in midair—she whispers it in flirtatious song lyrics. Because this poem has already led to dancing.