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Paul Scott Stanfield reviews a poet’s log of fourteen days in quarantine.

Lisa Fishman, One Big Time (Wave Books, 2025), 64pp.

In July of 2020, had the world been operating as it routinely does, Lisa Fishman would have been gearing up for the August publication of her seventh collection of poetry, Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition – planning an itinerary of readings or bookstore appearances, perhaps. Nothing was operating routinely in July of 2020, however, and no one was going to attend a bookstore appearance or a poetry reading, much less travel anywhere for one. Instead, Fishman was in Canada, living alone in a friend’s lakeside cabin, counting down the required fourteen days of a quarantine. One Big Time is a poet’s log of those fourteen days.

Although Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition was not written during the pandemic, it matched the unclassifiable moment in which it appeared. A crazy quilt that felt scrappy and patterned at the same time, that collection stitched the trivial in right alongside the serious, leaving open the question of which was which. One Big Time evokes quite another aspect of the pandemic, one perhaps more visible in retrospect than it was at the time: the benefits of retreat, of withdrawal, of putting things on pause.

For much of the book Fishman observes and interacts with outdoor phenomena – water, trees, animals – but the tone is not that of Thoreau’s Walden or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. For one thing, Fishman does not come across as someone powerfully drawn to the outdoors; she finds a hemlock tree she enjoys sitting under, but notes that in the case of this tree she is “not afraid / to lean against it how one sits / against a tree but usually / I don’t because of dog pee / in the park.” For another, she does not have a naturalist’s affinity for knowing the names of things. “[T]hese purple flowers clustered / on spindly stems—fresh thyme / or is it / oregano,” she wonders at one point, and at another she can tell us no more than “on this side the water’s called something // on that side the water’s called something else.”

“[W]here’d my vocabulary go,” Fishman asks herself late in the book, but the problem is less one of misfiring memory than of the slippage between things and events and the names we assign to them. Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition often noticed how baggy a fit our language was for our experience, and One Big Time frequently comes to the same conclusion, as in this pair of lines from early in the book:

   All the different kinds of moss have names

     but of course they really don’t

I was pulled up short by the second line. They don’t? Why not? Because, for most of us, all moss is “moss,” regardless of the distinctions made by botanists? Or because no kind of moss knows itself as “moss,” the word being not at all integral to its own being, but just a tag for human convenience? Might these tags – might language itself, in its clumsy approximations – sometimes even get in the way of our understanding the world? In one comical but revealing episode, Fishman is momentarily flummoxed by looking for a “passage,” a narrow body of water connecting two larger bodies of water, when she should be looking for a “portage,” a path where one can carry one’s boat from one body of water to another. Words can so powerfully direct our attention that we fail to see what is right before us.

The very body of water beside which the cabin sits is another example. Like moss, it bears a few names, not all of them easy for a native English speaker to pronounce:

   The five lakes are called:
     Wakomata, furthest east
     Jobammageeshig (largest)
     Huston, west and north, barely connecting to
     Blue Heaven Lake, but this makes six
     including Chub
     & Little Chub

   The name of the big one, Jobammageeshig, is said very fast
          so only the first syllable’s clear to the visiting ear

The lakes having different names is convenient, of course, and even tells us something of the history of the place, but gets in the way of seeing that there are not five, possibly six, bodies of water, but one: “All five lakes are connected here / or, one big waterbody has / 5 names.” A similar realization gives the book its title. In quarantine, the routines of the calendar, with its own processions of time, almost evaporate:

   Time’s named like
         connecting lakes
      —this day, that day—
   If you could say water’s
   continuous, one
        continuous body of water
      that goes over land
          here, there,
   then of time you cd say
   the same: it’s one big time
   with different names
   (yesterday, today, &c)

One big waterbody, one big time: William James wrote of mystical experience that it often “is a monistic insight, in which the other in its various forms appears absorbed into the One.”  Fishman’s mystical experience is a grounded one – literally so, as she discovers that bare feet may make for a more profound connection than sexuality: “I used to think it was eros / but no shoes gets you closer / than no clothes” – but still a revelation, the way departures or interruptions in routine often open doors for us. As day follows day, she bonds not only with her hemlock but with some of the local fauna: “Here on a rock I see the loon / does not perceive me / as a threat.” The site of the cabin becomes a peaceable kingdom. Still, Fishman is grounded enough to realize that the fish who seem to be paying her a visit are actually looking for breakfast:

   If the surface is clear
   from shore at dawn
   you can see straight thru to layered rock
      it’s brighter underneath
   & a fish just now
      came toward me, then 3 more—
        fish are the ones
   I won’t eat again
   their life’s too good
   although they do seem to be looking for something
   first thing in the morning

After all, even in a peaceable kingdom, a fish has to eat.

Fishman’s is a well-populated solitude, not only because of the flora and fauna, but also because of the tutelary spirits somehow present: her late father, whose old letters she is reading, Joanne Kyger, Lorine Niedecker. The dead, perhaps, belong to the same “one big” as the living. On the next-to-last page, she invokes her mother in a passage that wonders about the mysterious underlying unity of things.

   Light on the water
   (maple) leaves in the light
   over water
         from here (under hemlock
   above water) i can see
   the answer to a question of my mother’s:
   the “pockmark” pattern on the stones
   is the same as the pattern on the water
                             in a light
      current when the lake is quiet
            so
   a shift in the medium (element)
   repeats the pattern

Her mother, it turns out, has “been painting what I’m seeing / although I haven’t described it / or sent any photos,” a coincidence that is just the right note on which to end Fishman’s account of two weeks spent in the uncanny that is always all around us but that we are not always able to perceive.

Paul Scott Stanfield was educated at Grinnell College and Northwestern University, and is recently retired from the English Department of Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of Yeats and Politics in the 1930s and of articles on Yeats, other Irish poets, and Wyndham Lewis.