Looking back I realized that I planned to finish List 15 — said I’d continue in 16 and did to a degree, but forgot Reiss’ The Survival of Butterflies in the Wild. Earlier I forgot Wanda John-Kehewin’s In the Doghouse (which I mislaid and, for the life of me, couldn’t find for weeks).
That means, to correct the record, the 2013 total should be: out of 165 books in 2013 19 books by mixed gender, 72 by males, 74 by females. About those last two books,
- The Survival of Butterflies in the Wild by Murray Reiss (Hagios, 2013) reduced me to a sputter of adjectives. Amazing metaphors. Powerful. Significant. Moving. It all meshed together, elements coming back at irregular times, relating but extending in a new way, such as the narrator’s club-footed twin that his father said died and his mother said never existed. His invisible twin remains in the shadows of unseen Poland. What does one do with the silences of parents, the griefs they think they conceal but which leak?
Will the Nazi legacy ripple out to seven generations? The craft of this and the way he melds personal and public so that it feels self-aware and aware of the wider context both. It’s been a long time since I had to keep pausing a book to warm up from chills. It accumulates though, so I’m not sure how much effect would come across in an excerpt except what you can see of craft and intensity, say in Unanswered Letters,In the cradle of my skull I hear
dead tongue. My father’s barbed
wire Yiddish, his letters home
to Poland, crowd the night. My mother
takes in alterations. Her feet work
the clattering pedals. She stitches
one word to the next. I listen
for the rustle of uncles and cousins
in her thread. A needle through
my tongue would make more sense.
She steams his letters flat
with her heavy iron. It hisses
in the night like the whispered
orders of men gathering at the door.
No one breaks down our door. No one
answers my father’s letters.Things become other things without ceasing to be what they started at. Sounds in the night are European family but don’t stop being the sounds of fixing clothes. In other poems he becomes a pupa, but doesn’t stop being himself or indistinguishable from his father. There is a stage of remove of threat but not removal of threat. There’s childhood memories but not encased in childhood voice. He’s not working the clever phrase so much as the complex metaphor. There’s a symbolic reveal of our relationships to the past, as each parent practices it and because it is so specific it can become general.
In the Doghouse by Wanda John-Kehewin (2013, Talon) mixes it up from concrete poetry going in a spiral or a bottle and wineglass. The book is structured into 4 parts modelled on the medicine wheel. Each quarter has 4 parts of self, physical, mental, spiritual, emotional; the 4 seasons; the 4 races; the four stages of life; the four elements. The notes at the back of her journey from teen leaving the reserve to go the city and the over 2 decades to come back with all her identities including Vietnamese.
The poems are more frank than nuanced but interesting such as Torn in Three (p. 38-39) there’s something spoken word about the thrust of it,‘Twas in the church where I tasted
the sinful richness of red wine,
the very same wine that swallowed
my mother whole and spit out her soul.
“In moderation,” just a recommendation
for those who who have not travelled
on the lonely road of geno-sui-cide,
frozen in the minds and spirits of
our very own mothers,grandmothers,
fathers, grandfathers, sisters, brothers,
uncles, aunts, and our childrenThe poems go from Gaza to “One Thousand Cranes” (p.50-51) where someone wishes for you dreams of 1000 cranes of peace,
when sorrow is too great
they do not want to come too soon
for you may never want to leave
the dream world — and so they wait
at the edge of your dreams with love
resonating, encompassing you, for love
has no timeline, and reaches beyond
the edges of the human sorrow.In a previous episode of Literary Landscape I read her blessing poem of “Red Warrior Woman”.
And onto 2014.