Hagiography by Jen Currin

Coach House Books, 2008
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen

Years of Words Blown to Bits

Jen Currin’s Hagiography works backwards. From Death to Birth, with Childhood and two Intermissions between, we are treated to a lyrical voice that makes strange connections and allows the reader sometimes only scant assistance between great leaps of imagery and idea. The beautiful language in the first section includes the lines “Once in a forest I cut myself / and claimed I was the knife.” In this we see the confidence and control Currin displays throughout. The poems maintain an almost wholly consistent tone from start to finish that lets us know that knife is sharp.

Often the poems feel like lists, corralling supposedly disparate items—such as (in prose poem “I Drink to Our Ruined House”) “Wings in our teeth. Breast to breast. We will marry in burnt swaddling clothes. Let it be known in the city of our distraction. In debt like the moon. The phone’s celestial ringing. The piano hushed”—into one poem. While sometimes I failed to find the common thread, my interest in the fresh images she shares never waned. The genius of her titles (“The Bridge Melting Behind Us”, “The Stove Refuses to Cool”, “The Hand Is Equal Parts Healer and Fool”) and the worlds she exposes allow a reader to let go of making perfect sense and give permission to live within the sense of sound. To me this inventorying found its culmination in “The Town in Her” where the list of parts creates a whole that allowed me to go back and reclaim meaning in poems that had previously mystified. As soon as one stops searching for a link and instead uses images as puzzle pieces with which to shape one larger image or idea, a magic to these poems begins to emerge. In “The Town in Her” we are given strange bits of an unsure love—“An eyelash on the toilet seat”, “Shallow kisses weigh down the quilt”—affirmed in the last stanza: “I love her and do not need to.”

Also central to a reading of Hagiography is paying attention to the subtle, intelligent shifts in point of view. Most of the poems are written in second person. The insistence/presence of “you” wanes and waxes, burning particularly bright in the Intermissions, which operate as love songs. The second person shift at the close of the first Intermission forces the romantic “you” to merge with the reader “you”—“You will read this with both of your hands.” After this the book begins feeling more intimate when we (“you”) become party to the next intimate scene when the following poem begins “I tell the teeth of your mouth: / I waited for you and the devil never came” and ends with “Your shoes get too tight…” And in the next poem when the narrator says “The sun flexed its muscles across your back” we can almost begin feeling the heat.

Taken as a whole, the book seems to want to move backwards in an effort to reclaim what we lose in the course of living: “For a spirit to enter a bottle, / there must be this— / years of words / blown to bits.” One may also take note of all the spirits populating the final (Birth) section as proof that the entire book has taken place after death, the long remembering of things that came before. While there are no saints overtly referred to within the course of Hagiography, one may also begin to believe that “you” and “I” and the other entities within are the saints never mentioned by name.