Asylum in the Grasslands by Diane Glancy
May 1, 2008
The Arizona University Press, 2007
Review by Kimberly L. Becker
The Greening
If, as Diane Glancy observes, “Writing is a conversation,” then we are fortunate to listen in on her latest collection of poems, Asylum in the Grasslands. Author of more than thirty books, Glancy is also novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her many literary prizes include an American Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Native American Prose Award and a Sundance Screenwriting Fellowship. In Asylum in the Grasslands she devotes her formidable talent to illuminating the history of the Cherokee.
There is movement in these poems: both forced removal and migrations to “the grasslands of the next world.” Spirits of ancestors come and go, since “Distance is no measure.” Women have traditionally been esteemed as leaders within the Cherokee community, so it is no surprise when the spirit of Great-grandmother stops by for a visit. Yet when she speaks in Cherokee, “I shrug in frustration. How do I tell her even the / words of her Cherokee language do not survive?” Glancy acknowledges that spiritual connection sustains even when native language wanes: “I watch the buffalo cross her / cheek. Under the buckskin there are grapevines for her ribcage. / In her pocket a map of pit stops on the large arc of her restless / migration.”
Glancy transforms the ordinary into the luminous. A snakeskin found on the lawn is first “A crackly robe. / Delicate. / Royal. / Something the children / would have played with” then “a robe Clytemnestra wore / after her daughter Iphigenia / was sacrificed.” The speaker rolls the snakeskin in her hand and thinks of “the sacrifice of women.”
Government boarding schools forced Indian children to sacrifice their own culture in the name of assimilation. “Boarding School for Indian Women” addresses the resultant sense of dislocation: “Now our world is taken, and we are / left with this shadow of our making. / The next world is far away.” Glancy’s poems access the past, yet one “beyond memory / into heritage / or ancestral levels of thought.” Her writing evidences what Gerald Vizenor termed survivance. She witnesses to loss, but also to “a power that transcends horror.”
These poems affirm a transcendent power. In the title poem she envisions the Savior as someone you meet “in the prairie grass / his face so full of light he’s milk-eyed / you let his ideas roll over you / you even forget the bitterness you learned / all your life.” In “Buffalo Medicine” the buffalo are at one with the Great Spirit: “…we would run through the prairie / with the wind in our ears. Our large heads pure with mind. The / Great Spirit great as he spoke. Yo. Were his. We grunted / his praises. Snorted and roamed in his will.”
Like wind through the prairie grass, Glancy’s poetry whispers insistently: listen. “Language is still enough,” she asserts in one poem. In this moving book, it surely is.
Bruised Hibiscus by Elizabeth Nunez
May 1, 2008
Ballantine Books, 2000
Review by Mary Senior Harwood
Hidden Truths
The brutal murder of a white woman whose body washes up on the beach in the small village of Otahiti in Trinidad – the result of “man-woman business” say the men — sets this book in motion. Zuela, the Venzuelan wife of a Chinese grocer, meets Rosa, the daughter of a plantation owner, at the shrine to the Virgin in Laventille and acknowledge their shared past as childhood friends. Rosa’s fear is that this murder will be played out again in her own home by her black husband and Zuela finds herself drawn to the shrine to fight thoughts of retribution to her harsh husband who took her from her family and married her as a mere girl.
As playmates, the two girls witnessed the rape of a girl behind a hibiscus bush. Rosa is haunted by the rapist’s repeated mantra, Beg. I know you want it. Beg. When she hears her own husband uttering the same phrase, she fears for her own life. The image of the bruised hibiscus, whose brilliant flowers fade to the same purplish blue as a bruise, recurs throughout the book.
The cast of characters reflects the multi-hued Caribbean society. Rosa is the daughter of a plantation owner, but unknown to all (because of her pale skin and hair) except her mother and nanny, her father was a black man. Cedric, Rosa’s husband, is the son of a black woman and an Indian laborer whose father was sexually abused by Rosa’s father and who committed suicide when rejected by the plantation owner. Cedric’s marriage to Rosa is in part retribution. Zuela represents the population that migrated from South America and her husband, Ho Sang, the Chinese influx, many of whom became merchants like her husband.
Nunez uses the universal theme of violence toward women to echo the violence and injustice of the colonial era. Several events during the years Trinidad worked toward independence from the British Commonwealth frame her story and intensify the dual message of the immediate violence done to the two virtually enslaved women and the history of a country raped and enslaved by colonial masters. When the people revolt, they lash out at any symbol of that power – including Rosa, who they perceive as white.
It is also a book about secrets – the secret of Rosa’s father’s homosexuality, her mother’s affair, Rosa’s heritage. About the crimes that haunt Ho Sang and drive him to opium to forget. About secret passions of love and hatred.
If It Be Not Now by Natalie Miller
May 1, 2008
Athena Press, 2007
For lovers of Russian Literature.
- By Cheryl A Townsend
Natalie Miller’s story of Demetrius Ulyanov is a heart wrenching saga of most unfortunate events, beginning in youth and continuing to his painful death.
After his mother dies giving birth to his sister, who also dies, Demetrius’ grief-stricken father commits suicide. Demetrius, a young lad, is then left alone and utterly devastated. His interrupted attempt to hang himself leaves him forever marked and ashamed.
In young adulthood, Demetrius opens a tailor shop, living a quiet, simple existence until his childhood friend invites him to his wedding. Giddy with anticipation, he packs up for the big city of Moscow, entrusting his business and home to a close acquaintance and begins another chapter of despair.
Demetrius is Ukrainian and unable speak or understand Russian. Debarking the train, lost and confused, he asks simply for directions. No one understands him, nor he they. He is assumed an insane lunatic and subsequently becomes a scapegoat for the killer of a local doctor. A judge hurries the untried Demetrius off to life in prison where he is at a loss for the reason or anyone able to enlighten him. For 6 years, he is continually humiliated and beaten. Pathetic and meek, he wanes. On one of his trips to the infirmary, an opportunity for escape arises and he takes it.
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Demetrius’ run for freedom ends with him collapsing in exhaustion and ironically waking up in the yard of the very friend he initially came to see. I really hoped for the happily ever after here, but it’s just not in his fate.
Fairly soon after, the man who had initially framed Demetrius confesses his guilt in a suicide letter, leaving Demetrius officially a free man. A free man that still suffers his untreated prison beatings of broken bones and a final rendering of Tuberculosis.
Recouping at his friend’s home, Demetrius is contacted by a grandfather he never knew of and learns he is now an extremely rich Baron. Knowing his own impending death, Demetrius asks only for a simple cottage in the country to live his remaining days contentedly. His grandfather allots for all Demetrius’ expenses to be paid, including a new doctor that becomes his only friend there.
Demetrius finds work at a tailor shop, meets Sofya, falls in love and marries her as soon as she’s free of her parents planned arrangements. Sofya tends to Demetrius through his fevers, weakness, and hauntings. They conceive a child and Demetrius is delirious with delight, albeit also remorse that he will not live to know it. I leave Demetrius’ final devastation for you to suffer on your own. And you will. It is impossible not to care about a man so giving in spirit and forgiving in nature. An extremely compassionate story just waiting for Adrian Brody to turn into an Oscar winner.
Mz Miller writes with incredible emotion and depth. I’ve never felt so compelled, so sorrowful for a character than here. I fell in love with Demetrius…and I miss him.
Femme au Chapeau: Poems by Rachel Dacus
May 1, 2008
David Robert Books, 2005
Review by LouAnn Muhm
If I were to define an overarching theme of Rachel Dacus’ 2005 poetry collection, Femme au Chapeau, (David Robert Books), I would use the title of a poem describing her reaction to seeing an x-ray of her broken fibula , Elegance of the Hidden. So many of the poems in this collection reveal just that, whether it is in the daily maternal and domestic tasks in “Apple Pie Order” with its focus on the mother’s hands “above [whose]industry I feel the tears,” or the ways in which a husband and wife reveal their differences in their grooming rituals, where “one augments, the other minimizes” in separate mirrors, “one…wiped of distracting fog/ The other [making] a cheek moon-size/for probing a follicle or pock.”
Over and over again, these poems bring us into tight focus on the things we walk past every day but don’t see: the hummingbird pausing on a branch, the single perfect apple in a litter of windfalls, or the daily tasks that women perform unnoticed as they “Scrub the crud from crevices/…Neaten the chaos of the night/and bake a loaf of innocence.”
Not all of the hidden elegance examined here is pleasant. There are poems exploring the losses inherent in involuntary childlessness, in family rupture, and in death. These poems avoid sentimentality, however, employing clear-eyed reportage that lets us as readers come to our own conclusions and judgments of the father whose self-portrait “points to the harrowing/ his future wives will take,” or whose “mouth becomes ocean/[and] turns his family into rocks with eyes.”
Throughout this excellent collection, Dacus brings a sharp and humane eye to the world around her and within her, and allows her readers “To stand together/ in the light that streams/ from a hidden source in this world.”
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
May 1, 2008
Graywolf Press, 2007
Review by G.A. Banks-Martin
How To Mourn A Son
On March 6, 2008, Elegy, Mary Jo Bang’s fifth book of poetry, won The National Book Critics Circle award for 2007. The book, an extended lament for the poet’s deceased son, reminds us that death, while final for the dead, must be contended with by the living daily; nightly. For after the lost is announced, and the body reduced to ash, the narrator states my mothering lips are stitched/ Shut by sorrow.
The early poems, pages 3- 36, are concerned with beginning the mourning process. Here three critical points arise: mourning goes on night and day, no one really understands, and there is no relief. These stanzas from The Cruel Wheel Turns Twice best illustrate the first idea:
A bus slithers by
A din. The aluminum morning takes on more tension
And becomes a metal rod
Straight from a tunnel, dropped in a gate groove.
Disappointment. And again. The End gate
Opens and it’s, Please
Come back. Please Be. Then nothing. Only end-
Less night taking off from the smooth tarmac slate.
The potpie clock, its stock of twelve numbers,
A stew for the weak and the weary.
The poem ends And daylight a gift tied with some tinsel, however, the gift, is simply a break from night. Likewise, Landscape With The Fall of Icarus is a description of the guilt that consumes the day. The poem explores the last moment mother and son spends together. The mother struggles to remember which train she watched her son ride away on and declares:
That car should be forever sealed in amber.
That dolorous day should be forever
Embedded in amber.
In garnet. In amber. In opal. In order
To keep going on. And how can it be
That this means nothing to anyone but me now.
This poem’s last line is one of the many lessons offered; mourning is personal and worked out in isolation. In addition, we begin to hear whispered, if you do not understand; if you think I can just get over it, you are either very young, or inexperienced. We will hear this whisper throughout the rest of the collection. We will hear it even, after we reach the final turning point, the last line of Now, The body as ash/ is inadequate. We will hear it whispered in every line including the very last Goodnight. The ordeal comes/ To its periodic end/ Which simply means/The ahead is again. Many will say that it is a cliqued message but it is a necessary message because we cannot speak of such lost with the level of purity, honesty, and simplicity, as Mary Jo Bang does in Elegy without experience.
Hagiography by Jen Currin
May 1, 2008
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.
Theory of Orange by Rachel Simon
May 1, 2008
Pavement Saw Press, 2007
Review by Metta Sáma
“Free association is or “Everything that irritates us about others, leads us to understanding ourselves.”: a review of Rachel Simon’s Theory of Orange”
–Metta Sáma
Rachel Simon’s debut collection, Theory of Orange, 2005-2006 Transcontinental Poetry Award winner, judged by Dean Young, opens with the (false) promise of a “Recipe for Success”. Simon leaps from “eighth-grade embarrassment” to “a new apartment” and back again to “desired birth order[s]” and “compar[ing] childhoods”. This “recipe” seems to comment on poetry-making, book-making, as well as poet-making: “burn it in your cheeks for when doors/swing toward you faster than your arms can brace./Befriend lost children in the produce.” (3) The ironic title and attitude creates a light, self-conscious tone for the book.
A voice and brain-driven poet, Simon honors the frustrated leaps that permeate her world. In poems such as “When You’re Not Allowed To Daydream”, “Anxiety”, “Autobiography” and “Humid”, the jumps invite. In the prose poem “Daydream” she writes: “One can live for years without knowing the teaspoon is inaccurate. Call the bureau of weights and measurements. They’ll understand. In massage school I learned to rub a full belly in clockwise motion…” (1. Not only is the prose form a wonderful tool for these leaps, Simon’s humor has a mental, emotional, and psychological organization, creating a delightful and capricious symphony. In other poems free association works well for Simon’s tone, but don’t compel me to return to the lines and engage on a level beyond quirky, and often, predictable brain play.
Simon’s line, voice, and emotional range are most memorable in the poems “Rope” and “Present Tense”. These elegies to a friend who died young are heartbreaking because Simon gives way to the heart, the spirit and the body, as well as the mind. The lines are lumpy and the stanzas achingly untended, the language splinters, and I believe in all of the creaks. From “Rope”: “I can’t picture you opening the door of the hardware store/comparison shopping rope gauge, fingering/the textures, picking the blend that felt best rolled in your fist.” And ends: “Two years later,//two years in which I’ve pressed my face/into a pillowcase every night/I’m told you used a bedsheet, spun and knotted”. This poem honors the Simon seen earlier, the poet daring to take risks by moving from one idea/situation/image to the next, seamlessly and unpolished. Unlike the poems in which brain play is a short crutch, the shifts here feel entangled and real and powerful and muted in grief.
Many poems fail due to their floppy line and inert line breaks. There is no sense of identity in the lines as units, nor in the line breaks as tension and revelatory moons. While I enjoy free association, Simon’s thoughts on the page feel forged and lackluster. I’m more interested in seeing where these thoughts connect, instead of seeing that a poet can imagine queerly. The book, as a whole, feels staged, fretful, self-conscious, and anticipated. The poems often end abruptly or go on longer than necessary. Yet, Simon is a poet worth waiting for, precisely because she is self-conscious, fretful, stagey, predictable, and like any great young poet, willing to fall hard.
Metta Sáma is a book reviewer and poet. She previously reviewed Celia Homesley’s first book for Hercircle.
The Light Sang As it Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography by Eileen Tabios
April 1, 2008
Marsh Hawk Press, 2007
Poems For
by GA. A. Banks-Martin
Eileen Tabios published her first book of poetry in 1996 and won the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, fourteen collections followed. Her latest book seeks to creatively solve some of the most difficult of poetic problems: love, despair, hope without reason, and absolution. Therefore, it is with great excitement we read Eileen R. Tabios’ collection of poetry, The Light Sang As it Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography.
Almost immediately we are offered along prose poem; a father portrait, although it is not the one we expect. Most fathers spend the day working or looking for work, in everyday places: police stations, firehouses, cabstands, restaurants, employment agencies. They honestly collect $12,000-$35.000 a year; motivated by little more than the approval of their wives and children. Unless, he is Ferdinand Marcos, who stole as much as a 100 billion dollars, who was accused of 1500 extrajudicial killings, and played a part in the execution of a popular political rival. Who believes such a father can be loved? Tabios, who asks: How many centuries until it was known that Judas was Jesus Christ’s/greatest apostle, not his greatest betrayer?
Having learned that reconciliation is possible we move from prose to Hay (Na) ku, a simple form, created by the poet, requiring six words stanzas composed of three lines. A form that challenges the notion that a line must be longer than three words; instead a line should be less than three words when more would serve only to destroy the purity of what is said. Consider this selection from The Mushroom Chapter:
Back in London
each autumn
I
would receive a
bag of
dried
mushrooms. The last
one arrived
in
the autumn of
1939, shortly
after
the outbreak of war.
Ironically what causes the thirty year parting of Tabios and her biological father is too painful for/even a poem but many outstanding moments awaits the reader as the two are reunited then parted by death. Some oddly sad and funny such as when the poet purchases a card for her parents 5oth Wedding Anniversary: For You Mom And Dad/ in curlicue script/ Sentimental drivel. But the poet with five million/ poems/ couldn’t/ muster anything better, while others hearken a sense of peace and well being. Cantos are usually associated with Ezra Pound, and are so complex that readers purchase an index to add with comprehension but these much like the rest of the other poems, are very palatable:
Canto 4
We labor less
as we near our Goal.
As we near our Goal
so do we fly, not run.
So raise your dark feet
from upon “Morocco’s sands”
And perhaps you are looking today at a sky whose
blue sapphire radiance often makes her sing, and
you hear her singing now.
No need for a guidebook just a few moments of uninterrupted silence.
Road of Five Churches by Stephanie Dickinson
April 1, 2008
Rain Mountain Press, 2007
Where Could I Possibly Go Now That I’ve Been Here?
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen
From the very first story we can tell this will be a book full of fresh characters the likes of which you and I have never seen. To give a quick summary herein of the worlds experienced would be impossible. The people who populate Stephanie Dickinson’s Road of Five Churches include two teenaged girls (“down-winders”) running away from a fallout zone, a girl kidnapped by a traveling saleswoman, a young fundamentalist Christian mother of four who is contemplating abortion or suicide, underage prostitutes, the falsely accused informant sentenced to death, and a thieving Korean orphan, among others.
These stories, full of female protagonists and sidekicks, are feminist above all. They touch on such issues as reproductive freedom, government nuclear pollution, the war in Iraq, domestic spying, race relations and our history of lynching, Native American genocide, and the exploitative prostitution rings of young Eastern European girls. Dickinson somehow breeches all of these worlds with the effective voice of an insider, and without the didactic tone that might detract from the quality of the prose.
What works well in adjusting to the extreme shifts of location from story to story is Dickinson’s impeccable pacing within each narrative. While there is often much to see in the environments she provides, we are compelled to note and dwell more on the absences. In the desert of “Fire Maidens, ‘57” even the birds have disappeared in the wake of nearby nuclear testing. Our attention is drawn to the empty skies, to rusted automobiles and ditches at the side of the road. Everything through main character, Monarch’s eyes is seen through the lens of leaving. Anything that can’t assist her escape is left out of description. The language—as in all the stories—is mostly as spare as the landscape, with truculent dialogue and just enough back-story to see us through to an ample understanding of where the characters have come from and where they’re likely to end up.
Dickinson is at her best though when the language is unfamiliar, when there’s mystery to what a character reveals. As in the title work (somewhat reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” both in subject and for it’s near Southern Gothic style) when Nia tells us, “Even if I wanted to slip into the driver’s seat and turn the key in the ignition, my hands wouldn’t do it. God would turn them backwards on my wrists” or in “Leaping Elk Shootout” when Hatchet notes that, “The room is frigid; it’s the panic blowing in.” Not only is the language and rhythm on, but the meaning is incomplete. It gives us room to work with, leaving us with the open door through which to see ourselves, a quality the best of literature has.
At times though description of things can seem overly clever—as a walk up a flight of stairs is compared to the “Lewis and Clark expedition” and a secret to “the Paramount Theater with its purple velvet curtain”—when something spare and delicate would do. These moments are admittedly rare and forgivable in an overall engaging read from an interesting and emerging writer.
This volume shows cruelty and human culpability and pulls no punches. The women here get neglected, exploited, kicked, and killed, yet stagger on, prevailing in what will prove to be the long memory of their readers.
The Girls: A Novel by Lori Lansens
April 1, 2008
Back Bay Books, 2005
Reconfigurations of the Self
Review by Shannon K. Winston
Lori Lansen’s The Girls: A Novel is a subtle and carefully crafted investigation of what it means to be human and to engage with others in the world. It asks important questions such as: what does it mean to be “normal” and human? Where do the borders of one self-end and where does that of another begin? How do we relate to others, our bodies, and space?
The novel deftly addresses these difficult questions by narrating the story of Rose and Ruby, conjoined twins who narrate their story (stories) of their lives together who are abandoned by their biological mother and adopted by a hospital nurse. The girls are two fiercely different individuals who inhabit the same body. Rose begins the narrative by stating: “I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon” (Lansens, The Girls, 3). These lines establish three of the central themes of the novel: the gaze (and unique perspectives), companionship, and life experiences, for this story is told by two girls who conduct both unusual and quite ordinary lives: they are defined as much by the experiences they have not had as by those they have.
One of the greatest strengths of the novel is the range of experiences and emotions it addresses. The sisters often describe their feelings towards each other as continuations of their feelings towards themselves; the line between self and other thus gets blurred in interesting and complex ways. The narrative describes what it is to feel someone’s presence—as the sisters do—without every seeing the other. Girls: The Novel thus proposes an alternate way of being in the world, in which there are alternative ways of experiencing the self and others. Rose explains: “I’ve never set eyes on my sister, except in mirror images and photographs, but I know Ruby’s gestures as my own, through the movement of her muscle and bone” (5). Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Lansens probes the deeply familiar and the foreign and shows that the two terms are not always binary opposites; in fact, they often coexist. In short, this book is an understated attempt to challenge so-called “normal” lived experiences and to propose, instead, that we reinvestigate our own position in the world.
Finally, and interestingly, The Girls is also a meditation on the writing process itself and what it means to create a narrative. The story unfolds as we read it and each girl shares her side of the story. Each chapter, therefore, presents a shift in point of view. It posits the difficulty and advantages of a double narrative just as it describes the many joys and hardships of a doubled existence.
