by Wendy Vardaman

The Halo Rule, Teresa Leo
Sister, Nickole Brown
Ordinary Beans, Gwyn McVay
Bonneville, Jenny Mueller
The Gravity Soundtrack, Erin Keane

from Women's Review of Books, January / February 2009

The poetic voices emerging out of the collapsed dualism of deliberately obscure Modernism and deliberately transparent, but often plain and unadorned verse demonstrate a dynamic fluidity of thought. Oppositions—such as narrative and lyric, transcendent and transient, poetry and fiction, formal and free, personal and impersonal, human and nonhuman—coexist, inform each other, and often make for a far more gratifying reading experience than the poet-centered verse of the recent past. No matter how personal, on the one hand, or resistant to narrative and coherence, on the other, each of the five first collections of poetry considered here puts story at its center. And each tells its story in lines that reach for lyrical heights, embracing beauty and artful language and rhetoric, even when—or perhaps especially when—the story is anything but beautiful. All five also make interesting use of genre—chick lit, melodrama, science fiction, romance, memoir, adolescent and children's lit, and pop song—and despite the authors' formidable academic credentials, all are clearly written with the reader in mind, though they don't mind challenging those readers either.

Both The Halo Rule, by Teresa Leo, and Sister, by Nickole Brown, tell a single, unified story through individual poems, one about the breakup of a relationship, the other about a devastating childhood and its consequences. These two books resemble memoir, with dashes of melodrama and chick lit, and both, especially Brown's, also resemble the increasingly popular "verse novels" for adolescents in their focus on a life problem and in their use of plot, although to say that is to be reductive with respect to their language and lyricism.

The Halo Rule zigzags between carefully crafted free verse and free formalism, incorporating rhyme and rhythm in unexpected places. (There is even the occasional sonnet.) "Suite for the Possessed," for example, a free-verse poem about a kiss, ends with a heavily alliterated and dramatically effective line of metered verse:

When the doors open at 16, he pulls back (mal occhio),
the bright heart a passage (jettatura),

then dread. I know the lateral and play it, that hand:
first felony, last flight, no fold, this floor.

"Engagement Sonnet," an unmetered, unrhymed, and thus rule-breaking poem whose metaphors reference love and sports (as frequently happens in this collection) likewise moves between the supposedly opposite goals of "free" and "formal" verse. Throughout this collection, Leo's imagery erupts with the brutality of love and of conflict. In the powerful poem, "Storm Door," the lover "throws drinks at the wall / the way Ali threw punches, hard, without warning, / / roped dopes and blinding jabs. / With us, it's always more rock than paper." She reinvents Narcissus as a sociopath bent on sexual conquest in a series of persona poems that break up but inform the main narrative.

The last half of the collection becomes more predictable than the first, as it excavates the narrator's past with sexual coming-of-age poems and poems about ethnic and class identity. One of the final poems, "Love at the End of the 20th Century," uses the language of combat against itself, and suggests that The Halo Rule itself isn't, finally, about romance, but rather about the way the language of romance positions us to encounter each either and the world:

I loved like an army,
at the brink of war—all battle plans, camouflage,

shoot-to-kill, seizures. The romance,
first tear gas, then morphine, nights

of white heat, sutures, slash-and-burn, shock.
But then, right at the end of the 20th century,

in the year of the hostage, as if dropped by
     chopper,
a bomb that didn't explode—you,

conscientious objector, accident, rapture,
and me, auto aim and rapid fire.

Then the words I'll carry to the other side changed:
mercy, surrender, standdown, light.

Like The Halo Rule, Brown's Sister straddles the poetry / memoir / fiction fence. Brown's website calls the book a "novel-in-poems," though the term "novel" appears nowhere in the book itself. It's hard to know whether this story about sexual abuse, violence, and the possibility of redemption would be more difficult to accept as truth or as fiction. Interestingly, the problem of authenticity that has made splashy headlines in the world of fiction and memoir has not yet publicly arrived in the poetry world, although poets ponder it among themselves.

Regardless of its classification, however, Sister tells a powerful female coming-of-age story with many familiar autobiographical elements—class, sexuality, powerlessness, and a growing command of language that finally frees the narrator, at least to the extent that any of us is free. Less familiar is the subject matter of pedophilia, especially treated poetically, and the attempt to humanize the pedophile. But sexual abuse is only part of the story in these often densely beautiful poems addressed to the narrator's younger sister. The narrator feels she has sinned against her sister by not speaking out, by not offering protection, by leaving and, worst of all, by not loving her. Confessing those sins as she simultaneously exposes her stepfather's crimes, the narrator attempts to understand the brutality in each of us, which begins with acts of not caring for the helpless.

As with Leo, violent imagery abounds in many of Brown's poems, which explore ugliness in language that often defies that ugliness, lifts off, then collapses back on itself—as in these lines from "What I Did, V":

When you were five, I took a
thing that was yours, a jar
of fireflies you spent all night
plucking from the gloam, and while
you hollered from the locked side
of my bedroom, music and smoke curling
under the door at your feet,

I set the bugs loose in the dark...

Against the plot's brutality runs a traditional chronicle of the narrator's growing command of language, as in the poem "Speak & Spell," in which she instructs her sister how to spell pedophile: "Who knew there was a word for it, much less a right way to write it down? / Pick up that crayon again, show me what you've learned, / make this into a word, make it a note left behind."

Although Sister seems aimed at female readers, anyone would appreciate the beautiful and carefully chosen language Brown uses to tell her story, particularly as it contrasts with the harshness of its events and enacts a choice between ugliness and beauty, as in this passage from "How She Conceived," in which the narrator imagines her own conception:

Count nine months back.
Find June,

find the foxfire summer,
find mama's fifteenth year,
a dark undergrowth
of fern and fertile knots of water
moccasin down at the creek,
high, green, and indifferent

to the trying of her new
softness in a concrete slick
basement where cave crickets
fiddled in the moldy dark,
or on a rooftop where shingles
gripped her, black grit catch
on her tender bare—

Although the remaining collections do not have unified narratives, they are still very much interested in stories, readers, and fictional devices. Gwyn McVay's Ordinary Beans, the most deliberately detached of these books, is also the least troubled and most gentle. It often veers humorously into fantasy and spiritualism. The opening poem, "The Demoness," is a surreal account of an adventure-loving female devil's advice to the poet. "Her Superpowers" tells about a superhero-in-training who needs a little coaxing to believe in herself:

"I think you're ready," the guide said. "You know you're off-balance. Pull up your mittens, kitten. Listen: blood-red cherries."

She straightened her neck. "Blood-red cherries," she repeated. This was the signal at which she must act to become no longer a slave.

McVay doesn't limit her persona poems to human or even fantasy characters; others include "Song of the Pretty Sweater," "Gorilla Face in Crumpled Underwear," "The Griefs of Private Objects," and "Bulletin from Fantasy," in which Decay is considered:

Herself,          the Right Grand Corvidess,
First Feather of the Second Arrow,
Significant Watcher at the Concrete Gate,
picks trash.

Not all of McVay's poems involve coherent stories; some gather a collage of quasi-narrative events that don't really add up: In "Eyebright and Toolshed," fragments of images push the reader in a narrative direction but resist narrative itself as they veer instead toward nonsense:

My whole eyebright was sunspot-red algae,
the old customary corncob throbbed,
I saw daredeviltry,
as through an unwholesome golem gloaming.

I lay all day on my bêche-de-mer,
I chairmanned through the night,
learning to flip
at the flasher of the mastodon.

Outside, the summer squash railroad,
a Simon Legree of rosin and rendition
feldspar in pints.
Even new lieutenancy is fugal.

None of this makes for easy sense: what is a customary corncob, a golem gloaming, a bêche-de-mer? The syntax likewise jars, but there's humor here, a lack of seriousness in "the old customary corncob throbbed," "the summer squash railroad," and even the "bêche-de-mer," which turns out to mean prepared sea cucumber, an aphrodisiac—all of which invite the reader to laugh rather than to try solve the puzzle.

Although McVay's poetry is often lighthearted, it is serious, too, and interested in nothing so much as good-humored and inclusive spirituality that embraces the human and the nonhuman, gods and demons, the planned and the mistaken, the East and the West. Her poems include a demoness who bursts into flames, astonishing the poet, and mythical, religious characters such as the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Sisyphus, and Shiva. "The Enola Gaia Museum" best illustrates this fusion of the jokey and the serious, combining in its playful title a reference to the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and Gaia, the godess of earth, or of war and peace: "I am Shiva, destroyer of worlds / says Gaia, I created my own bomb."

Like McVay, Jenny Mueller also tends toward the referential, the interrupted, the impersonal, the fragmentary, and the less narratively whole. Her poems, too, employ narrative, character, and other fictional devices. Just as McVay mixes the transcendent and the transient for a humorous though serious purpose, Mueller combines the old and the new; and just as spirituality forms the spine of McVay's poetry, nature serves that function in Bonneville. The collection is neo-Romantic, its lyrical poems rooted, like those of the nineteenth-century Romantics, in nature, but with the difference that those images have become disjointed, unfamiliar, and distinctly discomforting.

Consider, for example, "Peninsula," which mixes images of landscape with those from film, so that the experience of nature is not firsthand but rather mediated by the camera:

    The water
played in a tape loop. Behind, the park hissed
like the park in Blow-Up, a tape
hiss—the pines started ringing
like glass. We'll want
to return here: we'll want
to play back. In the chilly hotel,
to have breakfast in fur.

    Darling the campgrounds
are sodden abandoned, their sites
bitten in and the paths
steeped in cold,
chemical soak.
An etching, a darkroom
developing. We come in and flick on
a switch, find ourselves
in a circle of Technicolor mosses.

Likewise, the poem "Sundowning" takes the standard romantic/lyric devices of attributing human characteristics and transcendent power to Nature, and makes something creepy and menacing, rather than sentimental or safe, from them:

The crickets start praying to the porch lights.
Their chant overtakes the god.
Where, my darling, are your eyes?

Called back
into the grass,
your eyes at first sent down as spies.

Many of Mueller's poems work this way, but with slight variations: "The Donna Party," the title a play on the infamously cannibalistic Donner Party expedition, mixes the natural with the disturbed; "Northumbria" flows in and out of panicked fragments about getting a trapped bat out of the house and references to the Venerable Bede; and "Memorandum" describes a glass high-tech workplace on the Edens expressway: "The lobby holds a tortoise / a lion a horse and a lamb, / and a white stag roams unmolested." In an interesting bit of commentary on her own enterprise, "Lyric," addressed to that mode itself, asks what it has left for poets:

To look at the sky and beg wine,
to barter the cardinal's neck
for cocaine, this is a human's
animal hell, and from what can I sing to you there?
Better a false song about you?
What will the world be
when you give me nothing to say?

Erin Keane's The Gravity Soundtrack is, paradoxically, the most irreverent of the books considered here, as well as the most concerned with spirituality. Simultaneously playful and careful, her poems move, like Mueller's and Leo's, among free verse, form, and the appearance of form, with stanzas of the same number of lines, occasional syllabics ("Where the Wild Things Are"), numerous unrhymed sonnets, and a terrific, barely recognizable villanelle, "Science Fiction." As with the other authors, there's cross-pollination among Keane's poetry and other genres, most notably science fiction, children's lit, and popular music. The dominant mode of the collection, however, is the persona poem. The Gravity Soundtrack is peopled by Johnny Cash, Orpheus, Aphrodite, Aunt Molly, and a legion of characters from children's books.

Funny and dark, Keane takes on some of the same subject matter as the other authors, such as the brutality of childhood, which she captures especially wen in the sequence "Never-Ending Stories." These poems reinvent the histories of the main characters in classic children's books, a method familiar from feminist poetry and fiction, where it is used to show how traditional narratives exploit women. Keane cleverly turns the method toward children, whose narrative oppression is less familiar. Each of her virtuous heroes or heroines becomes a broken and exploited creature, and the narrator's persona through the sequence is cynical about belief and virtues—as are the characters themselves and the inscribed reader. Thus, at the end of "The Secret Garden," "it is Easter, but as we all know, / there's no big miracle, no empty tomb, only / your shovel, your mud, your marbles, your worms." "Little Women" imagines a Beth who has sex with Laurie when she knows Amy will see, then runs off to New Orleans. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is written from the point of view of a "bad kid" who mocks Charlie and the virtues he represents. There's humor here and pathos, as well as variety; the poems entertain while raising serious questions about the exploitation of children who, like the children'ssbook character Madeline, lack good parental care.

Although the other three parts of The Gravity Soundtrack do not cohere as tightly as this sequence, they possess a similar sensibility and return with biting humor to recurrent questions about the transcendent and the transient. The titles of each of Keane's sections imply that contradictory sensibility—"Eternal Playback," "The Express Line to Heaven," "Never-Ending Stories," and "Something Like Prayer"—in a poetic landscape where pop songs provide the liturgical music, a record store clerk is both a miracle worker and a bum, and technology will be the means through which we're brought to judgment, our sins displayed on electronic billboards in "The Jumbotron Nightmare." "The Laff Box" likewise posits an unlikely relationship between technology and spirituality, both of which come under attack in this funny but pointed poem:

                                  Bury me
with my Laff Box, so I can keep on chuckling
right into the Afterlife—an endless marathon
of reruns, my classic episodes, the "Applause"
sign always lit, seasoned with just the right
timbre of giggle to encourage my decomposing
audience and the voracious, easily pleased worms.

It's the back and forth between these jarringly different registers that makes The Gravity Soundtrack unsettling and entertaining, intense and lightweight, all at the same time. As the title poem says, writing of a rise that suggests rebirth but isn't:

We were

scared, fatherless kids who couldn't
name the men we loved .... We wanted to
see how long we could hold our breath,
waiting, waiting, for spots in our eyes,
the burn in our bellies, for the slow
false rise from the floor, the lifting,
the dizziness that felt like floating.

Ultimately Keane's poems try to jolt us out of seeing God as something tidy and suburban. Think of him instead as "A Divine Infestation": "We're not even supposed to be talking about / him. We are afraid of betraying nonbeliefs. Still, / he dazzles."

Sometimes it's just hard to get out of your own sensibility—Hindu or Catholic, narrative or lyric, formal or free verse, academic or pop, East or West, human or nonhuman. As Keane's poem "Science Fiction" suggests: "How carbon-based we are, / hair, some bone, mostly water." These five poets work hard to create both a de-familiarization in our thinking and a realignment along more tolerant and sustainable lines, eclectically mixing the modes available to them, dwelling less on themselves than on the significance of their subjects, recognizing the reader's presence and challenging her to respond.

About the Author
Wendy Vardaman holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals; a poetry collection, Obstructed View, is forthcoming in 2009.

Women's Review of Books
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Wellesley College

Editor in Chief: Amy Hoffman
Poetry & Contributing Editor: Robin Becker