by Kyla Houbolt

We each have our own way into the lands beyond death, but it strikes me, reading these poems, that sometimes we can share our paths, or discover a footing from observing the path of another. Maria Dylan Himmelman’s poems occupy a borderland, standing at the edge of the quotidian and looking out over other realms—a homely and sometimes comforting surrealism floats her words into forms capable of being witnessed. Throughout, the music of Dylan Himmelman’s language enriches the view.

I long for a house in the Biglands
or wherever it is

that the best burning craters are found

I want every windowsill filled
with wishbones

I wish to believe that
what I already have

is enough (18)

Does that sound like fun? Given the fact that we all die and that death surrounds us while we like to deny its ubiquity, finding fun in this context is a prophetic and highly artistic skill. Sundry Abductions takes the reader on a journey that begins somewhat tentatively to explore that borderland where surrealism is the only true way to express dimensions shifting and shifting again. By the later poems in the book, the poet’s footing at that slippery edge has become profoundly sure. A certainty arises in the presence of all the questions.

But, well, what do I mean by fun? The mood here is more like a long, unfolding tragic disaster, but told with all its jewels flashing, its hot scarves revealing and concealing by turns. Fun for this reader, at any rate, to follow the turns of the dance: “The goats make a racket while the wind / blows the dirt back in your eyes” (45).  The section titled A Careless Cosmic Mistake offers vignettes of a family who live a dramatic and tragic life wherein

...the landscape outside my skull
is a wilted field pocked with small clucking birds
in search of tiny kernels of corn,
none of them the least bit concerned
with the sky or its falling (44)

And then in the final section, On This Lost Planet, the poet makes known her concern and apparent intention not to let darkness take her down: “….The hound starts to dig. The brass / raise their horns. I cross // to the other side of the street” from “The Unspeakable Illness Speaks” (54). And, in “Like the Stars”: “Lord, let them dig, let them dig // and then with my rust / let them paint the barns red” (56). Dylan Himmelman gives us a taste of humor too: “I can’t help but think it has something to do with / that ridiculous hat” (57).

Sundry Abductions is a journey, through stages of awakening, perhaps, or passages of wry darkness—taking heart somehow from the artful view of the endlessly tragic events we’re all witness to, if not mired in ourselves. “The dying star is always left on the floor / to smolder like yesterday’s headline” (15).

that when this is over we merit continued joy
a glass of hot tea, a spoonful of muskmelon jam
and all of our departed beloveds, together
on a plush carpet in God’s finest tent (59)

Be it so.

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Kyla Houbolt has work in Sublunary Review, Barren, Janus, Juke Joint, Moist, Neologism, Ghost City Review, Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere. Her most recent chapbook, But Then I Thought, is now available from above/ground press.