A Review of Matters for You Alone by Leslie Williams

Review by Carla Sarett

Leslie Williams, Matters for You Alone. Slant, 2024.

Review by Carla Sarett

It is curious given the centrality of friendship in our lives that today’s poets seem to have so little to say about it. We remember childhood friends we never see again, and fights with friends are often as bitter as any divorce. Friendship, for many of us, is carried on mostly through emails, texts, and Zooming—some friends (good friends, too) only exist in “cyber-space”; and yet, they’re none the thinner. It’s this rich theme that Leslie Williams tackles in her carefully-wrought third poetry collection, Matters for You Alone.

Not one poem in this book feels rushed; we feel Williams wrestling with her ideas about the limits of friendship and its meaning. The “friend” in this collection is a moving target—a person, another part of the poet, sometimes (perhaps always) the divine; a personal trinity is at work. In this context, the word “love” (so often shunned by the M.F.A. crowd) is a necessary part of the poet’s artillery. No other word will quite do the trick, and it pops up again and again. Williams’s lines and rhythms are so natural, it’s easy to overlook her control. In the wonderfully titled “Easy Hospitality,” love takes many “splendid” shapes, “wooden cradle, cup of milk”. but “it will always last”:

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          on stage-you'd say
          good girls, bad girls are loved the same, 
          but sometimes bad girls are loved more, 
          having come a further way.

          It makes everything so splendid-splendid
          and confused-what I've crept to
          before sunup: wooden cradle, cup of milk, 
          to these I have belonged

          entirely-it was love and is love 
          and I think it will always last.

---

Love, for Williams, is an “always” sort of thing—the poet is pulling and pushing and doubting, and yet love is “always” there. In “Quantum Entanglement,” love for her friend, like mysterious quantum entanglement, is invisible, “but what it makes you do is real.” (This might be my favorite line in the collection.)

---

          so I’ve lately grown obsessed 
          with physics: force and action, spooky action 
          at a distance, and love. Always 
          love. You can’t see it 
          but what it makes you do is real.

---

Throughout Matters for You Alone, Williams tries to understand the “self” in relation to “friends.” (By contrast, we hear little of family.) It’s complicated, and, to me at least, often funny. We have met these awful friends. One shallow or overly vain friend “changed six times until the sweater matched her eyes and the Bluebird cab she called.”. Yet, this particular woman, the poet admits, is “a party I’d want to crash again.” I think any woman (or, for all I know, any man) reading those lines will sympathize or smile—yes, this pal is a pill, but who among us would give up a great party? Or the friend who is “friendly, but also always / jockeying for better offers”—“never acknowledging what is it to me / my God so deadly serious.”?

There is pathos in the poet’s friendships gone awry or going away. In the cleverly titled, “Friend Shift,” she writes:

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          I'm trying to forgive my friend 
          who arrives like a bleeder 
          in an ambulance.

         I should minimize
         exposure, as to a bad 
         virus or too much sun.

         I'm always the shadow, 
         the "local talent," sweeping
         the floor, fêting her

---

What strikes me is the bitter aftertaste of distinctly petty slights. It’s hardly a tragedy when a friend ignores us for flashier social connections or tries to outshine us—it’s, well, what some people do. These poems don’t speak of financial scams or grave deceits; that’s not what Williams is after here. Small hurts are still hurts, and they amount to something “deadly serious” in these poems. Friendship rests on the everyday, almost forgettable, stuff—most of life, for that matter, does.

In an interview with ArtSake, Williams said she is “always inventing personae who can trip around in poems—as Emily Dickinson wrote: ‘When I state myself as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.’ There are always elements of autobiography,…then the imagination goes off and leaves your actual self behind.” These personae float, enigmatically, through the collection—often with the sense of being muffled. Adult life itself feels “best removed from floor display / stored climate-safe.” The poet’s sadness is “a dead-weight twin who makes no sound.” The poet feels (at sunset) “it’s time to shuffle around again and pull down all the blinds.”

Yet, the silence seems necessary for Williams, both for herself and for her sense of whatever “life” means. Take these lines from “Love Is the Crooked Thing” with their hints of Dickinson in the syntax (and even the exclamation point):

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          Trying to get a burst again of what it's like to feel alive,
          watching for the fox,
          might she be put forward to be seen.

          Burnish-fur, black socks, stealth, composure, all!
          How carefully we're made 
          of curiosity plus silence

          so the marvelous might enter in.

---

This combination of “curiosity plus silence” is a great description of Williams’ poetry. Silence is the entry point for the “marvelous.” The poem ends with “the relief in apprehending.”

A good-natured brand of domesticity softens this collection. The routines of ordinary life rescue the poet from melancholy. In the poem “In the Main,” we see a mother with humdrum chores (“driving carpool, mending hats, collecting / bottles and the patchwork cats” and rather sweet consolations (“small pine trees printed on my boys’ sleeping bags”). It’s the “main” (rather than the fringe, I take it) that offers Williams the emotional anchor.

While the poems in this collection work on many levels, I should not downplay the influence of traditional faith; the cadence and imagery of biblical language is evident. In an interview with Angelus, Williams states that she usually starts her day with Scripture:

I hope the poems are attuned to—and enmeshed with—deep images of the Bible. The beauty, terror, all the human failings, and the mercy. Plus, angels, demons, grasshoppers, almonds, vineyards, and precious perfume!

Several of the poems address the divide between the believer and her friends (or possibly one friend or lover, I don’t feel it matters.) She wonders: “Did we drift because she left the church?” Another poem speaks of a friend who decides “God was not / enough for her.” In “Vespers,” the poet asks her friend to join her in prayer (or perhaps a prayer group):

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          She said thanks, but no thanks
          when I invited her to join, 
          as if prayer were an exotic food 
          she might be allergic to, or didn't trust 
          she had the palate for, didn't trust herself.
          Sorry, it's not for me, she called as we shoved off, gathered speed.

---

So, the poet gathers “speed” as her friend declines the invitation of prayer—Sorry, it’s not for me. It’s no big deal that Williams fails to convince her friend (or even the reader) to join her: she shoves off, regardless. In “Ninety-Nine Stories of Love,” she feels God loves her

---

           like the defrocked priest 
           who, after converting thousands 
           in the convention hall, 
           got hammered alone in a hotel room.

---

Like friendship, the poet’s faith gets frayed and tested; she must find new energy. She has a “longing to be made new” that any reader (of faith or not) will recognize. We meet new friends, we manage to forgive old friends, we make peace with our flawed selves every day. To change requires clarity, and more than a bit of pluck and humor. In Matters for You Alone, Leslie Williams is moving “halfway to the shrine / with crutches torn away.”

Carla Sarett is a contributing editor at New Verse Review. She writes poetry, fiction and, occasionally, essays. She has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best American Essays, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net. Her latest poetry chapbook, Any Excuse for a Party, is out from Bainbridge Island Press. Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is based in San Francisco.