poetic conversations: The Vast Expanse of Water: A Review of Elisheva Fox’s “Spellbook for the Sabbath Queen”
Both as a queer reviewer of books by queer authors, and as a Jewish reviewer of books by Jewish authors, one often feels a certain pressure to translate what animates these works into terms more accessible to a broad audience. Certainly, as a translator of Yiddish poetry (and particularly of queer Yiddish poetry), I have endeavored to do precisely that many times. When Elisheva Fox calls her debut collection — Spellbook for the Sabbath Queen (Belle Point Press, 2023) — a spellbook, however, it is no mere poetic license. And, as anyone knows, whether the magical language is Hebrew or Latin or anything else, one need not be able to speak it as though it’s their mother tongue, but one must be able to at least pronounce it correctly for the words to be effective.
This review is a pronunciation guide.
Because the days of the Jewish calendar begin with the coming of darkness the night before, the sabbath candles are lit just before sundown on Friday, so that no part of the lighting accidentally falls on the sabbath itself, when kindling a fire is forbidden. Customarily, one also recites blessings before performing the good deeds they bless, and, indeed, when a man lights the candles, this is how he does it. He recites the blessing, lights the candles, and then starts the sabbath with the coming of darkness. However, Jewish tradition gives the lady of the house precedence in lighting, and when she does it, she will light first and then cover her eyes while she recites the blessing. Why? Because, as soon as a woman pronounces the blessing, she “receives the sabbath”; the sabbath queen (in the traditional metaphor) will fly eagerly into the arms of a woman without waiting for the coming of night (as any woman who has loved a woman might well understand), and so the lady of the house cannot light after reciting, and instead covers her eyes so that she does not enjoy the flame’s light prematurely, before she has properly prepared herself by reciting the blessing.
The first time you open this book (for I am sure there will be many, many times), you will find yourself doing it with your eyes covered. I had to close it after the very first poem — just for a moment (as one who has heard Fox’s voice cannot bear to be separated from it for long). I wasn’t ready to look upon it until I had read its words — a paradox that goes harder with books than with candles.
Yet this is just the beginning. After the candle lighting, the next step in welcoming the sabbath is the blessing over wine, and, as Fox pours, what spills into the cup is an iridescent mixture of the salt spray of her home, the Texas Gulf Coast, and the oil that haunts it as a source of both power and poison. This two-sidedness to all things — “black and unlit letters” (“keter.”) and the blank page, innocence and experience, mercy and justice, self-discovery and self-concealment — is never far from the mind of someone who knows, in her bones, the cost of magic. Poem after poem dives, like the osprey, “into water / coagulated with oil and mud / to slip clean away / wet and alive, // to glut / on a rainbow” (“glut.”), but Fox does not flinch from the ambiguity of that rainbow, which appears in the sky and under the ashes of her uncle scattered to the Gulf waves (“selkie.”), atop the slick of every spill and out from inside her own splitting ribs (marrow.”). And her familiars are not limited to ospreys. “[M]y heart cracks open,” she writes, “and a raven slips out / trailing a / veil of violets” (“aspic.”). It is a vulture that plays psychopomp to the profession of love she cannot speak aloud (“xvii: the star.”), robins who remind her to eat (“the world stands upon three things.”), a dove that she worries “will learn rightly from the raven” (“na’amah.”), which flew from Noah’s hand and didn’t come back.
That vast expanse of water (troublingly familiar to Gulf Coast residents in an age of climate change) and the fantastical space beneath its surface, is, for Fox (as for Woolf and for so many of us who have grown up on a coastline just a little different), the place where the self is both lost and found. “[F]or so long,” she writes, “i chose to style a life underwater / i chose to live flounder flat and tasteless” (“selkie.”). Were this merely a poetry collection, the diving of the ospreys would be enough. Poem after poem, the author would pile up the treasures she’d recovered so, and leave us pining after her birds. But this is a spellbook, and its author is not content with this. Again and again she opens herself to “expand / and burst // and drown” (“aorta.”); again and again she drains into the cup “notes from my throat: / a thread of pearls / i thought i lost / at sea” (“kaddish.”), “a wet and glittering grace // that unspools when the grass / greens under thunder’s thumb” (“glossal.”), “a tangle of veined violets and women I love when no one is looking” (“tzedek: the wild hunt”), so that, when the blessing is said and the cup is drunk, and it lands emptied on the tablecloth with the opening words of the final poem — “how unlike the ocean / I am — / I have no / depths that I hide from you” (“malkuth.”) — I believe her.
These words of Fox’s don’t occur in Jewish liturgy, but I like to think they are the words that the cup speaks every sabbath, when it is emptied, to each of us who crossed the Red Sea on damp sand. Certainly, they are the words that echoed in my head when I put this book down for the first (but not the last) time. They are the words I heard in a torrent of dreams as I slept. They are the words I said to myself in the morning as I stood dripping, transmuted, and wizened before the mirror — and I believed me, too.
If I have done my job as a reviewer, I have painted the place setting for you. You can see yourself, no matter where you come from or who you are, sitting at the table on a Friday night, a woman lighting the candles and covering her eyes as she recites the blessing, the wine pouring into the cup. You can see it all except, perhaps, one thing. What is at the bottom of the cup when you have drunk its last drop — what you’ve been hiding from yourself — that I cannot tell you, but she can.
That’s the magic.
