Defying the Eye Chart by Marilyn Jurich

Mayapple Press, 2008
Reviewed by Rachel Dacus

Opening this book at random, I was struck by the prevalent combination of frankness and expressiveness in these poems. The first poem I read, “25 Lines for Ascending and Descending Keys,” compelled because of its overarching music metaphor of piano keys and also because of its jazzy language and eccentric rhythms. Using music to dramatize a backward look at one’s childhood is a fresh and clever idea that seems to characterize a central quality of Marilyn Jurich’s poetry.

The poet addresses her child self with both compassion and reproach in these lines:

The eight-year-old rises, sticks out her tongue.
I (the she who used to be) refuse this mockery,
defeat – begin to practice “holds.”
I taunt, “I’m better than what you could become”

She continues the reflective review in a rueful self-duet: “You’d be much better now if you’d listened/ all those years, not closed your ears on me.”

The musical versatility of many of these lines reminds me of the imagistic surprises of Wallace Stevens and the verbal adroitness of Elizabeth Bishop. Jurich defiantly eschews the flatness current in so much of today’s poetry, and opts instead for often surreal imagery and dense language. I found her voice at its most original in poems combining these two qualities, as well as often incorporating myth – such lyrical pieces as “Oedipus Visits the Ophthalmologist,” “Prayer Addict” and “Planetary Pantoum, Glyphs on Mars.” The latter poem’s setting is strangely beautiful and repellent at the same time: “Across Phobos, fearful rock-fish moon,/ grooves tilt, repeat in narrow bands.”

poet describes other worlds – whether they are Mars or he Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin – in pithy mouthfuls. Jurich’s poems sometimes reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s linguistic and landscape fantasies. She uses even punctuation as a type of music in the following passage, whose uneven rhythm suits the exotic subject of a Martian landscape:

Like petaled comets, whorls lift from the crater.
Spiraling canyons above, colossal pyramids;
aureole fluting plays on polar ice-caps,
Sudden … mist, clouds massed like granite, wind.

Defying the Eye Chart is long for a poetry book (113 pages) and the focus broad (with seven different sections), but the length is justified by its honest, musical look at life and history, both personal and collective. This is poetry that makes no bones about life’s hard realities – aging, blindness, disability – but who avoids lament and rather sounds the wiser notes of praise, appreciation and laughter. There is elegance and sincerity here. Marilyn Jurich writes her own review in two lines from the poem, “Reading the Eye Chart”: “Unraveling my soul by what I see/ you count how close I come to hold desire.”