Joan Biddle reviews Something in the Potato Room, by Heather Cousins. Kore Press, 2009. $14.95
It is rare to come across a book like Heather Cousins’ Something in the Potato Room. A narrative poem told in the first person in a light yet troubled voice, it walks the line between reality and magic, not always revealing which is which.
Disheartened by people and her job—when her boss gave her an application for “Keyboarding I”, the narrator “…folded it into an / origami crane and tucked / it in a jar of yogurt- / covered raisins”—the narrator retreats into a secret room in the basement of a house “the color of lips and toe- / nails” and discovers something which frightens her at first, but which she makes the object of her study and obsession.
Cousins creates a world where there is a thin line between living and dead, where all living things have the potential to terrify, and the buried grow new life—a world where “Life / doesn’t stay still, and / death doesn’t stay still ei- / ther.”
Her precision, detail, and delight in language propel the poem. It becomes a mystery what is animate and what is inanimate. In the library, books “… still maintained / their plant magic,” and she “[vibrates] with the letters, / words, sentences.”
It is a lyric that could be performed—with fast parts and slow parts, nervousness and love, a dramatic arc and rhythm beneath the words. With stanzas arranged in columns in the center of the page, and interspersed with sometimes haunting drawings, Something in the Potato Room is at once mythic and real, funny and profound, beautiful and sad.
Anya Groner reviews Blood Ties & Brown Liquor by Sean Hill, University of Georgia Press, 2008. $16.95
Sean Hill’s 2008 debut collection Blood Ties & Brown Liquor explores the experiences of a fictional African American family across six generations. Taking place in Hill’s hometown—Milledgeville, Georgia—the poems focus on the life of Silas Wright, born 1907. Evocative of both Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah and Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor combines personal experience with local and historical specificity, aesthetic inquiry with moral imperative. Like Dove and Manning, Hill explores issues of identity—blackness, imprisonment, slavery and ownership, poverty, the terror of racial violence, and the creation of family mythology.
The book begins with “Southampton County, Virginia Aubade 1831” a poem about Nat Turner’s slave rebellion (“Some whites don’t rise with the sun/having departed in the night… The mockingbird greets the morning/with many tongues.”). With the exception of this first poem, the only poem that’s not about the Wright family, Hill relays historical fact indirectly, privileging individual experience. In the second poem, “Milledgeville Aubade 1831,” a slave woman imagines her lover, Nathaniel, rounding up foraging pigs, “Nate’s tin/badge shines on his homespun shirt in this early light/precious as silver, his freedom, his travel pass,/his way back to me.” The side by side telling of the simultaneous lives of two enslaved men named Nat creates uncomfortable resonance. Though slavery is an experience marked by the absence of choice, Hill’s pairing suggests not only the variation of experience, but the extremity of free will.
A similarly evocative pairing revolves around the 1946 lynching of two young African-American couples in Monroe, Georgia. In “Insurance Man 1946,” Silas Wright is told by a traveling salesman to buy an insurance policy because “Being alive is enough to get you killed./Did you hear about them folks up in Monroe?/If they hang you from a tree, you’ll need a will.” The following poem, “Nightmare 1946” splices and distorts the Insurance Man’s dialogue with Silas’ vision of his own lynching, bringing the reader into his own haunted consciousness, “Community men each with a broken-bottle grin/cutting their faces like a welt./If we hang you, you’ll need a coffin.” Neither poem flinches at brutality, but Hill’s primary interest is in psychic terror. Not only must Silas confront the frank possibility of another lynching (his own), he must weigh the market value placed on his own commoditized fear.
Hill deftly combines his excavation of the past with emotional lyricism, a strong sense of rhythm, and a rich texture of form (the book has a blues poem, two villanelles, a Haibun, and a Tanka). In Milledgeville Haibun, the prose section mimics a beating heart as the protagonist sneaks into the county jail garden to steal watermelon:
…theirs were the sweetest, so bust one open, the dull thud just before the crack, and eat the heart and move on to the next; and he moved on to women and settled eventually on one and finally busted her with finality, thud before crack, and he measured time raising sweetest watermelons for a time and time served he returned…
A man’s whole life is summed up in this single, fast-paced sentence. The prose section ends abruptly with a suicide and the two word sentence “Heart stopped.” The form then switches to haiku, the heart beat rhythm starkly absent, the landscape barren, and the tracks on which the man lay down to die suddenly overgrown, his life and death lost amongst weeds, “Old railroad, abandoned—/between crossties trees grow,/ a feral pig roots below branches.”
In a similar display of rhythmic dexterity, “Learning to Walk” uses a two syllable line to create the jagged beat of a child’s first steps “I/learned to/walk in/braces/hobbled/like a/dray an-/imal/or slave.” The quick turn from whimsy to slavery contains an emotional dropkick typical of many of Hill’s poems. Though aspects of Hill’s project feel familiar, (think Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family), his vision transcends the simple narrative of a family over time. The most poignant (and often violent) turns are couched between descriptions of the mundane.
My favorite poem is ‘The State House
Aflame 1833.’ In this poem, a slave named Sam wins his freedom but betrays his
community. When the slave auction block house catches on fire, (“Water can’t
reach the heights/a slave can. Sam’s a
bondsman), Sam puts out the fire, risks his life and douses the building. His
fellow slaves’ disgust is portrayed through the chanting lyrics of the rap song,
“The Roof is on Fire” by Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three, “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,/We
don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn,” which constantly
interrupts Sam’s freedom story. In this
poem, the rap chorus gains a swift new gravity, the 1980s frivolous
anti-institutional sentiment suddenly undercut with a deep-rooted critique of
slavery. As I read it, I wanted to yell out the lyrics in solidarity and
simultaneously mourn Sam’s trade of community for freedom. Hill leaves no room
for easy alliance. More than any other poem, this poem contains within itself
the intergenerational dialogue that permeates the book. By using repeating
lines, images, and life details, Hill creates the sensation that not only are
poems whispering across the pages, but the family members are too, parsing out
judgment and compassion across generations.
Corinna McClanahan Schroeder reviews I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, Karyna McGlynn, Sarabande Books, 2009. $14.95
The bravado apparent in the title of Karyna McGlynn’s first book, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, is entirely indicative of what follows. Winner of the 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Lynn Emanuel, the book is both a murder mystery and a fractured story of suburban girlhood—a book of “cul-de-sac badlands” and the “duplex kingdom” where birthdays are filmed and sandboxes are turtle-shaped, where “ritalin girls” babysit children in the church nursery and “a barrelful of something muffled” is rolled “down the back of a mountain” (25, 40, 49). Ironic, darkly sexual, and obsessive, McGlynn’s poems are refreshing—and daringly so.
While the title’s premonitory murder would seem to be the book’s focus, the murder is not dealt with directly until the final third of the book. Rather, McGlynn’s sections—titled “Planchette,” “Visitant,” and “Revenant”—contain a world in which the murder has already occurred and has yet to occur, a ghostly world in which the past and present comingle. McGlynn’s true interest seems to be the self and the self’s relationship to the past. In her foreword to I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, Lynn Emanuel explains, “[W]hat makes the book so crafty is that it uses the language and the style we have come to associate with the real and authentic ‘self’—trauma, violation, sexuality—to subvert the expected self and its confessions” (xvi). McGlynn’s first book is indeed an “appropriation autobiography” (xvi).
Even the first poem—at once an introduction and an invocation—contains this subversion of the self and the self’s expected ability to tell her story. Here, that story is simply unknowable: “I wake up somewhere in Ohio. Or, that’s how it smells— / There’s a phone in my hand. I’m thirty years old. / No, the phone is thirty years old. Its memory’s been erased” (xxi). Confession is undermined here by multiple possibilities and the speaker’s own doubt. As these lines reveal, it is the dreamy quality of the misremembered that marks McGlynn’s voice. The past itself proves shaky, incapable of holding up: the speaker’s childhood home, for example, has been “deboned” by termites—“in one bedroom a dresser with blue drawers / its peg legs rested on pure membrane” (3). At any moment, it seems, the whole construct or charade may come crashing down. And by forsaking the literal (for a house cannot be deboned), McGlynn frees herself to work with images and premises as wild and fantastic as she chooses. McGlynn’s observation act is at once originally strange and piercingly accurate.
As a book of subversive observation, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is also a book of revisions played out on the page. In “A Red Tricycle in the Belly of the Pool,” the reader learns: “a girl rode her tricycle around the bottom of the pool / the pool had no water; it hadn’t rained” (6). When the girl falls and scrapes her hands and knees, though, suddenly centipedes are sewing stitches under the girl’s skin; suddenly the tricycle is not a tricycle; suddenly “I’m sorry / the pool was full of water” (7). What we are given is amended before our eyes, which creates multiple possibilities, multiple realities—all or none of which may be true. These revisions—all present and contained in a voice that frequently speaks in a stream-of-consciousness style—together add up to tell the book’s complex and seemingly unmanageable story.
McGlynn works this same magic in terms of formatting. Several poems employ vertically-aligned spaces mid-line which creates the visual appearance of two columns on the page. These poems offer multiple readings—one can read the poem from left to right, moving down the page line by line, observing the medial spaces as a kind of caesura, or one can read the poem column by column. Another poem, “At the Far End of the Room Buzzed with 40 Tiny Fans” (37-38), weaves two narratives together, one of which is italicized, which also creates an opportunity for two distinct and valid readings. Each narrative is at once independent of the other and dependent on the other.
McGlynn’s poetry is, in general, a rather wild poetry in terms of the scenarios presented, though her language is concise and precise, never pointlessly vague or unnecessarily descriptive. Some of the poems are more immediately straightforward—“Amanda Hopper’s House,” for example, presents a breakfast table scene in which a newspaper article and an older sister outside with her boyfriend figure. This is not to say that the metaphorical level is not present, but that the realism of the scene has been purposefully foregrounded. Some poems, however, require multiple readings and encourage more doubt. In these, the reader begins to question what’s happening and, as a result, to question his or her own understanding, his or her own ability to make sense of the situation. “In “Sometimes in the Night a Naked Man Passes,” a beekeeper comes into the speaker’s room at night so that the bees can lay eggs on her face. In answer to her question “where are you going,” he replies, “the women in my life.” Such poems as this are dreamlike and ghostly, and the reader learns to go with them willingly, to depart from any sort of standard reality. In fact, in the disjointed question and answer scene just referenced, the reader senses that the impossibility of comprehension is precisely McGlynn’s point.
Strongest, however, are poems like “God, I Got Down There to Get Off,” “When I Came to There Was a Pearl and a Fish Hook,” “Erin with the Feathered Hair,” and “The Nursery with Half a Window Up Near the Ceiling” in which McGlynn’s meaning resonates through an appropriate ratio of literal clarity and her imaginative mystery which is so powerfully at work in this book. Lines like
Under the lip of the ottoman, something copper winks.
But I’m flat on my belly, hand in my jeans—
and how to say every penny has become the eye
of a dead relative watching me? This one from 1989—
I’m tapping my 6th-grade self on the shoulder,
watching her turn around with a sneer (18)
speak for themselves, full of wonderfully-irreverent lyricism. In the rare weaker poems (like “Post-Nuptials: The Wedding Party Floated Away on an Iceberg”), however, McGlynn loses this balance, and the poems’ confusion overrides their meaning and their purpose in the larger context of the book.
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is a jarring read, no doubt, but soon enough, as the reader works his or her way through the book, the poems come to make their own sort of marvelous sense. McGlynn’s startling imagery, her disregard for diachronic time, and her brazen and ironic language create a reality that is worked out on the page—a reality in which poetry provides power over the constraints of time. While McGlynn certainly deserves praise for her theoretically-interesting appropriation and subversion of the confessional speaker, McGlynn’s poems primarily stand out as well-written and finely-honed poems full of ironic sass and dark sexuality. Give the book a read—hers is, as Emanuel points out, truly an innovative voice.
Corinna McClanahan Schroeder is currently completing her MFA degree at the University of Mississippi where she is the recipient of a John and Renee Grisham Fellowship. Her work is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry, Measure, and Conte. She is currently the student coordinator for the Grisham Visiting Writers Series and poetry editor for The Yalobusha Review.
Emma Bolden reviews Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts, Ann Fisher-Wirth. Wings Press, 2009. $16.00. With its ability to name and organize the events of our lives, to situate people, places, and events in relation to each other, and to show their respective size and influence, a poem is, in many ways, a map, and the poet a cartographer. Through the searingly beautiful triptych of poems which make up Carta Marina, the reader follows Ann Fisher-Wirth as she plays the part of cartographer, attempting to label, organize, and therefore make sense of those parts of her experience which seem most nonsensical, most impossible to understand, and most impossible to reconcile with and relate to each other. During a ten month stay in Sweden, the speaker attempts to make sense of her existence in the “rainy hours” of an unfamiliar and iced-over country where she is confronted not only by her own physical frailty – her chest hurting so much that she can express the pain only in fractured language (“—Want to sleep want a painkiller strong enough to take the pain / away so I can remember the suppleness of breathing”) ? but the frailty of human life in general. Upon hearing piano music, a revelation strikes her: “that Chuck and Jonathan, my students, being newly dead / would never hear it, never sit in the Aula / gazing up at its leafy panels and painted dome of stars.” Confronted with the tenuous nature of human existence, the speaker realizes that any attempt to make sense of life will be difficult: “There’s no getting out of this easily.” Having already embarked on a journey through these darkened territories, the speaker’s experience of the world is further fractured when a past love appears in her present. Fisher-Wirth’s poems portray, with unflinching honesty and heart-wrenching accuracy, the process of mapping one of modern life’s most treacherous territories: the intersection between the present and the past allowed by modern technology. She struggles to find a name for the experience, presenting it first in terms of evidence for the reader to interpret themselves. In “Fragment: Email from Paris,” the man we will later know as a former lover admits both to not forgetting about the speaker – “Unbeknownst, however, you have had no trouble // passing through my memory (remorse)” – and wanting to see her again: “If you were not living in Europe / I would probably not have written you now . . . // You, my first ‘real’ girlfriend.” Fisher-Wirth begins a correspondence with him, struggling [t]o honor the present and honor the past, be in the present and not shut off the past [...] so that loss // is not the whole story. The poems follow the painful process of transforming the terrain of her life by allowing a past love to develop and grow in the present. The speaker is forced to “re-map” her life in the present and in the past, both as the woman with three grown daughters and a husband who “sleeps beside [her], / beloved, actual,” and as the eighteen year old girl who fell in love with a boy who loves chess and hates psychology, whose hands are knob-knuckled and eager and whose mouth always tastes of now “a doctor in As Fisher-Wirth maps and re-maps the landscape of her life, she turns for inspiration to Olaus Magnus’ 1539 map, the Carta Marina. The map presents both an eerily accurate depiction of the geography of Two swans sail in synchrony above two eels or fish towards rocks where a fiddler plays a tune and a ferret or ermine runs home to his mate peeking out from a shawl-shaped tunnel Magnus also includes unnatural interruptions, monsters and other creatures which disturb the natural order but nonetheless co-exist with the ordinary animals on the map. Like her former lover’s e-mail, these creatures appear out of the depths to rear their heads and render the natural order unnatural: “Two very large sea monsters / The one truculent with its teeth / The other horrible with its horn,” the “erect whale” who “sinks a big ship / With a look of dogged satisfaction...” and “Demons” who “serve themselves on the flesh of captured men.” Fisher-Wirth turns to the map and to these illustrations for explanation and guidance. In “The women of the Carta Marina,” for instance, she examines Magnus’ drawings of women involved in the work of life and death. Magnus presents women as playing one of two parts: the murderess who ends lives and the mother who creates and nurtures new life. There is the woman “Poised to shoot her arrow” beside a lover, two women who “are present / for the pouring out of blood,” and women involved in the beginning of life, as the “round-cheeked, / sturdy” woman who stands beside “a three-antlered reindeer,” gazing towards the viewer as “Milk gushes / into a wooden pail / from both udders.” However, as it involves both life and death, and bringing new life to a love which was once dead, Fisher-Wirth’s situation can’t be solved by retreating to these expected roles. She realizes that “the map’s a girl;” cartography, then, becomes itself a mode of creation, and the world of the poems opens as Fisher-Wirth begins to follow not the product but the process of mapping through the telling and re-telling of her story, which, in essence, re-creates it. In this way, and only this way, she can come to terms with their story.
Like Magnus, whose tendency toward continual revision and re-evaluation led to twelve years of work on the Carta Marina, Fisher-Wirth names, re-evaluates, and revises her experience. She first maps their story as that of “a girl in whose belly a child quickens, / who rises naked, calm / from her boyfriend’s bed” only to see a “smear of blood on the toilet paper,” then “the forceps, / the stillbirth, the hospital bed.” This, however, is the story she tells herself, and not the truth. She revises the story to instead reveal the truth she can finally name, now that the past and the present have so painfully joined together. She now knows her lover’s side of the story, and can revise her own in light of his. She re-maps their story as that of “the boy she turned to,” not the child’s father, who “covered her body / with the sweetness of warm rain” until “the waters closed over [them] both.” In mapping, she is able to revisit the moment when “She has not started down the road yet towards the blood, the gray coffin. He has not feared yet what he will fear for 37 years, and never spoke of to a soul: that he murdered her child by fucking her.”
Mapping becomes an act of survival, necessity; she must find a way to name, place, and thereby accept “This awkward, scary love, the way / snow falls everywhere, the way rivers / leap their banks in spring, and sunlight warns us.” In keeping with the sharp and brilliant complexity of the book, Fisher-Wirth recognizes that this is a flawed process, even a sickening form of escapism – “You get to the point where everything becomes metaphor, / everything becomes signal. / Then you sicken.” However, she also realizes that this is all she can do, and directly challenges both the reader and her lover to disagree: “He writes back, ‘It’s too easy, / turning bodies into words.’ Yes, / too easy – but tell me, what would you do?”
With a fierce and wrenching honesty, Fisher-Wirth forces herself through the process of cartography, which allows her to finally feel the emotions covered by thirty-seven years of silence: “One day the waters have their skin on. // The next day, after thirty-seven years, / a voice, a stone falls through.” Able finally to face the situation as it was, the bald mapped facts of it, Fisher-Wirth is finally able to grieve for the stillborn daughter she carries “forever, whose shadowy face is turned forever away from her,” and to love the men of her past and of her present: “Oh the heart / wants it all, every lover forever in me, / every lick of the setting sun wetting the wintry birch trees.” Through mapping her life in language, Fisher-Wirth works beyond her metaphor to the raw and real truth behind the words, which are, after all, just words – “Friend is just a word. / Love is just a word. / In love is just two words.” However, like the key of a map, these words act as tools and symbols to direct her in a journey towards revelation, revision, and rebirth. It is the gruesome and glorious cartography of language that leads her “towards hunger and toward plentitude,” and also towards healing: “I said to Peter, ‘Now I will turn the wheel / and finish the cycle with spring poems.” In this season of rebirth, during which “seeds, seeds / riot in the ground,” Fisher-Wirth is able to move beyond mapping and even beyond language to the center itself, the source of love and life and grief, “The split heart-- // The heart still split-- // All this human love and anguish--”
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Alicia Casey reviews Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, Paula Bohince. Sarabande Books, 2009. $14.95.
http://www.amazon.com/Incident-Edge-BayonetWoodsPoems/dp/1932511628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245075591&sr=1-1
In a recent interview with Sarabande Books, Paula Bohince said, “Grief really is its own universe: mysterious, isolating, and transformative.” Her first collection of poems, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, artfully embodies this universe of grief, moving the reader through interior and exterior landscapes in an effort to negotiate the sudden death of the speaker’s father. Bohince’s poems often recall the pastoral tradition, but her deft and subtle use of quietly ominous imagery undercuts the potential for sentimentality.
The first section of the book maps the physical space of the speaker’s childhood on a Pennsylvania farm at the edge of Bayonet woods, the “homestead” which “held many children,/uncles and great-uncles, delicate and stooping aunts,” as well as the interior landscape of the speaker’s memory (16). Although the speaker displays a clear tenderness for the land where she would “lie in the grove/of crabapples, /inhaling dirt’s pepper, [her] cheek/wet against stubble, /eye to mineral eye” (10), the reader is consistently reminded of the tenuous nature of recollection, and the ominous quality of a place where the “pasture is owned by a ghost/who turns meaner each hour” (14).
Throughout the poems of the first section, the reader senses that something has gone wrong in this gothic landscape, but the narrative thread operates like a mystery unfolding. The repeating images of birds serve as omens, but Bohince resists the usual harbingers of death, owls, ravens, or crows, in favor of orioles or the robin “sentenced/in red pajamas like a deposed king. This is the world’s/revenge against masculine beauty” (23). By flipping convention and using symbols of spring and hope to convey a sense of impending tragedy, Bohince creates a sense of sorrow that encompasses both the death of the father, and the death of the speaker’s hope of repairing their conflicted relationship.
In “The Apostles,” the first poem of the second section, Bohince reveals that the speaker’s father has been murdered by “friends,” who “finished him/with one shot through the ribs, left him/to bleed beside his bed” (28). The second section seeks to explore the character of the father, “an unhappy child/who played with guns and trouble, who had a daughter/by accident, each…bewildered by the other” (35), and investigates the lives of the three men who were present at the time of his murder. As the speaker returns home to put the affairs of the father in order, she begins to contemplate his life and death through the poet’s adult perspective and “everything becomes a version of [him],/assumes a fern or bird shape, some feathery thing [she] put[s] want into” (40).
By the end of the section, the reader has learned, along with the speaker, that the father’s murderer was John, a day-laborer who shot the father in a dispute over money. For the speaker, this knowledge is complicated by her memory of “John in his flowered/chiseling shingles off the roof…dwindling to one sexual minute caught…an image [she] think[s] [she’ll] die from” (42). Bohince conveys the sense of loss and betrayal that occur when the speaker learns the identity of the murderer, and there is a clear sense that the speaker’s trust in her own judgment has been compromised.
The final section of the book operates as a resurrection of the goodness that existed in the relationship between the speaker and her father. In poems such as “Farm Triptych,” the speaker’s recollections of the father, both positive and negative, provide a space for his continued existence: “Thus, he’s alive again,/though ashen as the snowball blossoms,/clusters once cut loose, scattered” (53). Although Bohince insists that she does not think of Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods as a novel in verse, there is a distinct unfolding of plot and narrative that provide the sense and closure of a developed piece of prose.
What prevents the text from being read strictly as a narrative of the speaker’s childhood, the father’s murder, and her acceptance of the situation, are the moments of lyrical transcendence in poems such as “Resurrection” which step completely out of the bounds of the “story”: “Ordinary/mourning. Nothing yet risen, no visible alchemy. Only/linen and dust hesitating behind stone. Brittle/carapaces of beetles to keep company the human husk” (62). There is an authority of voice, especially in the religious themed poems, that allow the reader to believe that the speaker has stepped outside “the story” and achieved a sense of peace.
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and I continue to be impressed with Bohince’s ability to communicate the vast emotional landscape of grief with sparse and poignant images, and brevity of language. However, some readers may find the choice to withhold the fact of the father’s murder until the second section problematic. On first reading, there is a danger of that decision being perceived as gimmicky, but, in subsequent readings, I’ve come to respect that choice as it allows the reader to take the journey of discovery with the speaker. I look forward to seeing Bohince’s future works.
Alicia Casey holds an MA in English from Austin Peay State University and an MFA in Poetry at the University of Mississippi as a John and Renee Grisham fellow. She has served as the managing editor for the Yalobusha Review, and her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Zone 3, and Hawk and Handsaw.
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Cathryn Essinger reviews Beyond the Bones, Neil Carpathios, FutureCycle Press, 2009. $14.99.
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Bones-Neil-Carpathios/dp/0578033100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1250105891&sr=8-1
In his new collection of poems, Beyond the Bones, Neil Carpathios, asks us to remember all of the hard questions that we asked as children: Where is the soul, who is God, and what does the heart know about being human? Like any inquisitive child, he is intent on taking apart the nuts and bolts of the universe, but as an adult he knows the answers are hard to come by and not always what we are looking for. Nevertheless, he is “determined to the find the book/every living thing must read” (“The Egg”).
Carpathios writes about eggs and goldfish, sea monkeys who dissolve like communion wafers, and earthworms who have stoves, books, pots and pans. He writes about laughter and playing hide and seek, as we look for the child who wasn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.
When all of our secret places were used.
we found a new way to fool each other:
we grew adults bodies
to hide inside
The child
has been hidden so long,
he’s desperate to be found.
(“Hide and Seek”)
In seemingly naïve phrasing, he mimics the voice of childhood, while at the same time questioning the nature of existence. He begins with a child-like statement such as, “What I like best about being a person…,” but follows it with an existential comment-- “is being alone aware of my aloneness” (“Being Human”). In “A Letter to the Future,” he writes, “It is good of you to wait for me/like a big brother purposely walking slowly/so I might catch up with short legs.”
This is an animated world in which trees eavesdrop on the conversation of ants, but there is also a wealth of ironies even in childhood: “the neighbor kid/ holds a cap pistol/ to his head,” “the old man next door/ who lost his wife/counts on his fingers” (“Any Given Sunday”). Behind this careful naiveté there is a sophisticated value system asking us if we are truly awake, aware of the responsibilities of being human in a universe where God occasionally just becomes “bored and ornery” and causes trouble. Ultimately Carpatios is spying on himself, on his own heart, prying apart the ribs and skin to see how the human heart is made, looking for the child who is “this very second peeking behind one of your ribs” (“Factoid #4: Children Laugh About 400 Time a Day”).
The second section of this book is about family, memories, his own childhood, and how we get on with our lives after losing the people that we love. He takes the child’s voice into the adult psyche when he writes:
I understand…
…why God must enjoy
being who He is. You never hear
of the Almighty feeling lonely
or wondering if he can save
enough for his kid’s
tuition.
(“My Kid and God”)
And in the third section, he writes about how we live as adults with the aches and pains, “the ruptured Achilles tendon,” divorce, and separation from those that we love. He suggests that we give more credit to love and try our best to avoid the “not now” syndrome that plagues adult life.
In one of the last poems in the book, Carpathios recalls a Buddist priest, “like a big baby in diapers, cursing into his cell phone.” “Maybe he is telling God off, /tired like the rest of us,” and we understand that we are still the child who asks questions that cannot be answered (“No Nirvana”).
This is a tightly woven book, artfully constructed and wise beyond its years. It makes you feel both young and old, and oddly hopeful that we may someday come full circle and find the child who used to belong wholly to us and to the universe.
Cathryn Essinger is the author of three books of poetry--A Desk In The Elephant House, which won the Walt McDonald First Book Award from Texas Tech University Press, and My Dog Does Not Read Plato, which was the runner up in the Main Street Rag book competition in 2004. Her third book, What I Know About Innocence, will be published this fall, also from Main Street Rag. Essinger’s poems have appeared in such places as The Southern Review, New England Review, and Quarterly West. She is a professor of English at Edison Community College, in Piqua, Ohio.
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Corinna McClanahan
Schroeder reviews Bad River Road, Debra Nystrom. Sarabande Books, 2009. $14.95.
In her newest collection of poetry, Bad River Road, Debra Nystrom revisits the Dakota landscape established in A Quarter Turn (1991) and Torn Sky (2003), and far from risking repetition, she makes new that stretching desolation. Bad River Road, Nystrom’s most expansive collection yet, offers readers familiar imagery to be sure—prairies and blizzards, the swallows and swifts that consistently move throughout her poetry—and familiar subjects—family, loss, the violence of weather and winter in the Dakotas, the tension that lingers from the injustice done to the area’s native peoples. But Nystrom offers new subjects as well—the death of the speaker’s mother due to cancer, the imprisonment of her brother, and the mental and physical decline of her father—and the maturity of these poems is a true measure of this poet’s growth. They are tangible and dreamlike, precise and yet sweeping because, in Nystrom’s poetry, “the boundaries of things are impossible to trace” (14).
In this collection, Nystrom stitches the mini-narratives of the speaker’s mother, brother, and father into a master narrative which reveals the landscape of a changed and changing family—changed by death, tragedy, setback. The book is an elegy for what has come before and for the present moment that is already passing, already gone. In this way, the poems are a stay against the erosion of memory and an attempt to heal what time has ruined. In “What’s Left,” Nystrom writes, “Six months after our mother’s / death, our father’s house will burn,” and the speaker preserves its contents in writing: a furnace room with “quilting hoops and crickets,” “letters / pushed to the backs of drawers” (70). Hers is an art of recovery.
Many of Nystrom’s most successful poems concern a brother. First introduced in “Crush,” the brother-as-child watches television shows about “Prince Good-Heart-Charming, Mr. Gone— / none of us understanding you were him all along” (29). In the second section, entitled “Stubble Field,” almost all of the poems center on this brother who is watched by “narcs” because he “might be bait / for something bigger” (43); who goes to treatment; who spends days in the jail’s “bar-banging choir of rage / and threat, white-lit panic” (56). Here, Nystrom is at her strongest. The speaker reexamines her sibling painfully and generously, and the caged loneliness of the institutions in which he is placed mirrors the Dakota landscape, its flat and inescapable enormity where rivers are the only way out. Nystrom’s language is tight and lyric, especially in narrow, vertical poems like “Shot” and “Days End” which pull the reader down the page. In this section (and in the book at large), Nystrom employs more stanzaic play than in her previous collections—she uses couplets, triplets, and quatrains to emphasize white space, silence, the voids between people and in ourselves. Here, the tension of her subject matter sings.
As in the two previous collections, Nystrom includes several poems about the speaker’s childhood and adolescence spent in South Dakota. They are often simple scenes, like children running downhill—“nothing more, nobody thinking this is a thing / to remember—who decides against remembering?” (40)—but Nystrom’s deft language proves these scenes to be worth remembering, telling anew. She gives us short narratives about cousins, childhood girlfriends, teenagers lying on the high bank of the Missouri River, their “fingers / marking signs in the earth that wouldn’t / be seen by us, or by anyone” (52). In “Bicycling to School,” no speaker is identified—only the title informs the reader. The poem tells of
…a scold from one bird and the moan
of wind over prairie—or maybe that’s an airplane
drifted off-course. The anemometer’s balls turn,
aimless, on top of the courthouse; rain gauge bone-
empty again. Hawthorns in front of school grope away
from the wind, their bearings lost, spikes blurred by
shadows that keep shifting, softening every surface. (14)
Here, Nystrom’s technique is spot-on. The title and the sonnet’s series of descriptions do enormous work in a short, tight space, and those details, coupled with Nystrom’s use of wind-like vowels, form her narrative of place—its sights, sounds, and all.
Incorporated into these poems of maturation are a few poems about Native Americans, some of whom lived on reserves in the area in which Nystrom grew up. Nystrom tackled head-on the difficult history of the Lakota people in Torn Sky, and here, she offers contemporary scenes—John Fast Horse with his Cadillac, the boy selling dreamcatchers by the memorial at Wounded Knee, the slogan “Kill the Indian, save the man […] written / above Father Joseph’s desk”—to which Nystrom stingingly demands, “What man was that? Save what man?” (50). In less skilled hands, such poems risk the soapbox effect, but Nystrom is straightforward when she writes of “graves, in ground seared and / hardpanned by wind and snow and / desolation,” “graves surrounded for miles / by graves never found” (80-81). The observant nature of her writing—and her focus on the images at hand—allows the situation of the native peoples of the Dakotas to come across honestly, full of tension, sometimes hope.
The third and final section contains some of Nystrom’s longest poems to date, and most are powerful scenes and meditations—like “Observatory at the Prison” and “Offerings.” “City of Forgetting” is the longest and unfortunately one of the weakest of the book (an inevitability in any book). Set in Washington, D.C., the poem contains friends cycling through “[m]emorials numbered like a board game” (62), a woman cleaning the dead in Baghdad, the Library of Congress, lines from Emily Dickinson, an imprisoned Moroccan cab driver, and a quotation from Psalm 51 applied to a whole slew of typecasts. Here, Nystrom’s usually tight scene becomes too sprawling, and several nonsensical line breaks also impede the poem’s flow. In this collection, readers see Nystrom’s new but only occasional tendency to breaks her lines on definite articles, prepositions, and demonstrative pronouns for no apparent reason, and at times, one misses the more purposeful and sharp-edged line breaks of A Quarter Turn and Torn Sky.
Overall, I highly recommend this collection. Each of Nystrom’s poems is organic and self-sufficient—in short, each can hold its own. Wonderfully, the poems as arranged in the book also reflect each other, echo each other, and form a dreamlike narrative of moments remembered and saved. They haunt, and in Nystrom’s work, it is truly as if “everything touched / everything all the time” (25). The interconnectedness of the images and subjects mirrors the interconnectedness of memory and time and place, and Nystrom proves again to readers that she is a voice worth hearing out, a voice worth remembering.
Corinna McClanahan Schroeder is currently completing her MFA degree at the University of Mississippi where she is the recipient of a John and Renee Grisham Fellowship. Her work is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry, Measure, and Conte. She is currently the student coordinator for the Grisham Visiting Writers Series and poetry editor for The Yalobusha Review.
