Somewhere Running,

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

Stephens’s work has been described as a novel, a prose poem, and a
visual poem. It revolves around a single visual image—which is
displayed on the cover in a sepia-toned snapshot—of two women
seemingly meditating beside a tree in a “fissured city” winter park
scene, “each woman standing opposite the other.” Throughout the
book, snippets of the image appear—a branch, a hand, a foot, a hatted
head. Each piece is titled as a numbered “Plate,” from one to 32.
Perhaps Stephens’s epigram by Gertrude Stein (“Successions of words
are so agreeable”) gives some insight into this difficult book.
Stephens is very fond of repetition and uses this device to give the
reader many options, as in Plate No. 3: “but somewhere / they are
running toward or away from one / another or perhaps indifferent each to
the / other they run. they do not stand still they / run and the way
opens to them.”

The reader is drawn into the mystery of why the women are in this
situation. Are they “standing face to face” or are they “no longer
standing but leaning or both standing and / leaning away from the point
of focus[?]” What is the “point of focus[?]” Stephens tell us
there is dialogue, but who is listening, who is speaking? She tells us
“[a] secret is being shared,” but we are not privy to the topic of
the secret. Stephens obviously believes that the soul is in the detail,
as her prose/poetry is ripe with particulars that may or may not be
significant. Even with the descriptive reality of the situation,
Stephens does not resist the metaphor when it pops into a line. One
woman “drops secrets into the hands” of the other who is
“listening with her hands the hands which / collect the words of the
one woman into her pockets / small treasures perhaps or heavily
weighted.”

A third protagonist enters the “story” in the form of the
photographer whose shadow “forms on the ground.” Is s/he
eavesdropping? Why do we hear that the artist “sees only one woman?”
In the spirit of this book, all will/ will not be revealed by its
conclusion. It is the illusive quality of the work that held me, but
others may be attracted by the sparse prose, the connection between art
and artist, and the exploration of women’s relationships.