Lisa Stice writes about the world as she sees it through a second-hand military lens. Her relationship to war is expressed uniquely in these poems, which are calm, quiet, and simply written, but also communicate loud, resonant ideas about being married to a military man and raising a family that lands somewhere between peace and conflict.
The phrase “Permanent Change of Station,” the title of the collection, is a seeming paradox which refers to a soldier’s relocation to a different military base. Stice asks in the first poem, named after the title, “Why do they call it permanent?” since this relocation could occur every two to four years, not just one time. She acknowledges that nothing holds steady, not “mountains / nor bridges, nor brick houses / nor anything else.” The sense of permanence, then, comes from the irreversible effects that such a transition has on the person, and on the person’s family, as Stice realizes, “we’re permanently changed.” It’s in this way that the rest of her poems continue: making sense of the familiar and unfamiliar in daily matters, showing how life that’s lived around the military swings between order and disruption, safety and fear, comfort and unease.
A few paragraphs about Stice can be found in the back of the book, but the poems themselves provide insight into who Stice is, especially in relation to her family. Several poems focus on her daughter and her dog. In “Afternoon One Day When You Were Young,” for example, she addresses her daughter as “you / with the feather-lite hair / the color of maple syrup / and pancakes” who chases her “Norwich Terrier brother.” Most poems revolve around these three figures: “mother / daughter / dog,” as listed in the poem “Father’s Day,” in which the significance of the father’s absence is most notable. The poem is simple, clear, and emotionally effective without dramatizing the fact that Stice’s daughter must be fatherless on Father’s Day. Other poems also quietly allude to this unfortunate reality. “Learning to Speak” consists of four short stanzas written in the daughter’s words, repeating “night night gone / Dada gone / shoe gone” and so on, as if his absence is as fundamental as language.
Stice’s language is rhythmic in some poems and straightforward in others. “Daughter” uses an extended metaphor which relates raising a girl to tending to a fire, as Stice writes,
mind now what I say
remain quiet
for when fire breaks
we call these special days
nothing to me is sweeter
than a crackling flame
This poem contrasts the short poem opposite the page, called “Growth Chart,” which consists of only three lines: “every time / I see you / you’re taller.” This poem, though short, is wonderfully ambiguous, as it could be applied to either Stice’s daughter or her husband, since his appearances are episodic, like something that would be marked on a growth chart, despite the fact that he’s a grown man. Her husband is as absent in the collection as he must be in Stice’s life, with more written about the negative space around his existence than his actual existence. The daily needs of her daughter and dog, then, become more important, and the language which constitutes their worlds seems to be the language in which Stice also exists, as she begins several poems with lines from Dr. Seuss and from Paddington, titles the final section of poems “Bedtime Stories,” and writes about lullabies and “Daddy.”
Not only does she draw from children’s books, but also from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a pairing which exemplifies the two worlds which Stice occupies and the two roles she fills, as the mother of a young girl (and dog) and the wife of a military man. Language around combat and fighting spring up in the quotidian, with her dog standing as “sentry,” her daughter bringing an “invasion” of questions, goats receiving a “ration” of food, and Stice noticing “a bed conquered / by stuffed animals.”
While these poems float in and around such moments of conflict and uncertainty, there is a wonderful sense of appreciation for the impermanent with which the reader is left in the final poem, in contrast to the first. This reads as a sort of peaceful resolution, the understanding that “sometimes what lies in our hands / leaves us,” and how Stice says “I could have explained this / how the things we know go away.” Maybe, even amongst the moving boxes and new neighborhoods, there is a possible contentment in the fact that you will move on, and that moving isn’t always so awful. You don’t always want to know only what you know, because your knowledge will change; and if nothing else, you can be certain of this.
Buy Permanent Change of Station (Middle West Press , 2018) here.
[…] Thank you to Rebecca Hannigan for her beautiful review of my poetry collection Permanent Change of Station. Thank you Into the Void for publishing the review and for all of the support. You can read the review here. […]