The first poem in Firefall (Unsolicited Press: 2025), Heather Lang-Cassera’s full-length collection of untitled verse, orients readers within the related frameworks of soundscape and landscape: “affection has been hidden in / the voiceless whispers” (9), she writes, sounds which are “found in the ferocity / of coordinates / stark and untamed” (9). The book’s detailed soundscapes of repetition and rhyme transcend the distinction between formal verse (featuring wide varieties of pantoums and sonnets) and free verse (featuring sparse lyrics and narratives with bespoke sonic architectures, in the American tradition of Dickinson). In concert with lush natural imagery, and ornamented by flights into symbol, linguistic sound is a central pillar in Firefall’s project: not merely recording specific landscapes, nor simply evoking their effects on the body, but using the established dialectic between body and environment to interrogate the limits of the individual subject.
A vivid sense of place informs the imagery and word choices throughout the book. Lang-Cassera includes both concrete and abstract characteristics of the landscape, as in “[Alluvial by maker,]” which describes
scalebroom, sugarbrush, riparian woodland,
this small-statured
woollystar & slender-horned
spineflower, now
on private land, often
unprotected. (44)
Readers are not only shown specific plants, but also told just enough detail about their “unprotected” status to subtly raise the stakes above bucolic impressionism. The speaker also invokes landscape as a constituent element in human freedom of action, using words like “automatic” and “readymade” in discussion of “a place / where meander means path, not action // to be taken” (44). As the book’s expanse of language continues, unbroken by titles, sections, or typographical variations (other than the occasional italicised phrase), readers act like surveyors, gradually mapping both physical and metaphysical terrain.
Lang-Cassera’s speaker understands sound not only as a feature of both language and landscape, but also as a site of memory. The book’s only prose poem (“[The number 10 (x.) is a window of multitudes, ecosystem of]”) describes
The low sky of a lost alphabet, your heart sketches its own diagram for every missed opportunity. Love is fetal memory for what we cannot understand, kept cradled in the curl of each of our empty fingers, every unit of sound. (43)
Entertaining the idea that “fetal memory” can be located in “every unit of sound,” as the speaker suggests, offers readers a fascinating lens for interpreting experience. In poetics, this presents a novel way of approaching sound’s role as a constituent element of linguistic meaning. In environmentalism, this presents additional perspectives for both conservation (monitoring and protecting soundscapes) and education (attempting to learn from them).
The concept of a landscape holding collective memory within its soundscape aligns with the way Lang-Cassera uses the verb “wait” in multiple poems. In a six-line free verse (“[Everything waits,]”), the speaker asserts stillness as a method of encounter: “Everything waits, / and we must be still / to find it” (54). In a sonnet of seven heroic couplets (“[This dream is not wingbeat, nor gunshot, nor]”), the speaker encounters memory using silence: “Near the rust-veiled moon, remembrances wait, / deep breath before sonic boom, silent gate” (19). The waiting “remembrances” are not explicitly linked to a subject, a conspicuous omission that opens space for questions: are they memories already made, or opportunities to make more? Are they solely individual, or perceptible to the collective? Where do these categorical distinctions begin to bend or even break if we consider sound or rhythm its own vehicle for memory, independent of the embodied subject?
Many poems use abstract nouns to further articulate the idea of a subject position—a set of memories, feelings, and perspectives—waiting to be encountered in soundscape and landscape. One noteworthy example, the mathematically precise “vector love,” is found in the opening lines of a Shakespearean sonnet: “Vector love waits for us, simmers in this / noon light, predictable but to someone / else” (42). In contrast, the most prominent word choice by far is the richly imprecise “ghost,” which Lang-Cassera deploys repeatedly. One of the book’s pantoums (“[Sheets of frost-gathered lace]”) modifies it with the word “exquisite” to describe something able to “fade into the heart”:
Trim the slender window
with gifts from the exquisite ghosts.
Every night,
the mundane stars sway
with gifts from the exquisite. Ghosts
then fade into the heart, leave behind
the mundane. Stars sway
with us in sotto voce,
then fade. Into the heart, leave behind
the bedframe for these rooftop trusses. (21)
Using cyclically structured repetition allows the speaker to create collisions in syntactical meaning, along with subtle variations on a core rhythm. Syntax also complicates meaning at a smaller scale, as in the nine-line free verse (“[Bees ghost line]”) whose speaker states, “Bees ghost line / the shadows, moonburst / in reverse” (29). The word “ghost” could arguably be interpreted as a collective noun, a phrasal verb, an adverb, or even a postpositive adjective. Syntactical uncertainties and malleable parts of speech evoke the embodied subject entering a strange landscape, encountering new configurations of action permitted or even forced by changes in the environment. Choosing to pause and listen to the exquisite ghosts forms something that lasts, subsumed by the embodied subject.
Lang-Cassera’s work puts forth an implicit question: to what extent can the individual be considered whole? Several poems address the idea of partial being, such as a pantoum in eight quatrains, which begins:
We bring the sky into the palms of our hands,
in a way, even if only a small piece.
When we embrace a lover,
holding them means only a part of them. (27)
If the whole lover is not held in the embrace of the beloved, then where is the rest? If the speaker’s being subsumes consecutive encounters with forces and flows beyond the body—with the “exquisite ghost” (21) or with “vector love” (42), to use Lang-Cassera’s terms—are subject, lover, and ghost individually or mutually constituted? Can we be whole alone?
Instead of offering rationalist answers, Lang-Cassera repeatedly circles these questions using lyric forms, offering readers structures and patterns through which to behold their own exquisite ghosts within the text. As the speaker of a pantoum in couplets (“[Waiting for the unbeloved sheep]”) observes, “this flickering question // taps out rhythms of the heart” (15), allowing inner life and outer world to physically manifest together within a shared soundscape. Each reader’s encounter will differ; as the speaker of the book’s final poem, a long series of tercets (“[Wanting water, here is where I return]”), admits, “in the end, everything / is hidden from at least somebody” (60). Despite this impossibility of identical visions or answers, Firefall reminds readers that there is value in opening oneself to encounter with the forces which constitute the whole.
