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Mon, 08 May 2006
Book of the Day: Night in the Shape of a Mirror by Lynne Knight
Night in the Shape of a
Mirror by Lynne Knight explores the decline of the author's mother into dementia. While it is possible to imagine this story being told effectively through flat, realistic narrative or as a sequence of lyric vignettes sequenced to sketch a larger story, Knight takes a riskier approach: she renders the story almost as a dream sequence, layering memory and meditation atop the narrative scenes. Music and image take on shimmering tones, as illustrated in this poem:
Prologue: Living
Apart
My mother is not a woman I can ask about sex.
Her body is like a building she has driven past
on the way to somewhere else, not paying
much heed. She knows the major stories,
but that’s about it. Until she fractured it last year,
she had no idea where her pelvis was.
She speaks of her insides, her plumbing.
But she is not a stupid woman,
so I can talk to her about need.
She knows about the spirit, having lived apart
from the body for so long. She says I mustn’t be
too greedy. She loves me, but then there is the world.
The cold place, she calls it. If I could talk to her
about sex, I could ask her if she thinks I crave
the spirit like a lover who just uses you,
takes and takes and then leaves—
if that’s what she means by my greed.
We all need something, she said the other day
when I visited. She was looking out at the woman
who walks up and down the street all day long
like someone who’s lost her door.
The poor soul, my mother says, and waves,
though the woman can’t see her.
I want to know if the hollow my mother feels then
is the same as I feel after sex, like watching
someone lose the body altogether in the distance.
But when I talk about my lover, simple things
like how he fixes salmon, a little lime and butter,
cilantro, my mother looks away, as if I’m talking
of sex in disguise. So instead I sit quiet, like spirit,
thinking if I practice living apart from the body,
my greed for hers won’t break me when she’s gone.
It took a couple of readings to begin to grasp the depth of Knight's poems. The time spent was definitely a good investment. Night in the Shape of a Mirror mirrors something different back each time I read it.
Book of the Day: Red Jess by Judith H. Montgomery
What struck me in reading Judith H. Montgomery's Red Jess in manuscript form was the exceptionally composed music of her poems. Montgomery's poems employ a variety of rhythms and tones, blended in interesting ways: free verse that dances around a regular meter; blank verse that employs rhyme at key moments, to bring an idea or emotion to full bloom with a sharp crack; and, along the way, a rich array of assonance, consonance, and other ear-pleasures. Montgomery is an especially skilled craftswoman in the lyric mode.
What is equally important, however, is the ends that craft are put to: Montgomery does not disappoint here either. Her poems, often brief, render highly complex emotions and stories in their sparing sounds. Consider "Gallop," about a young girl facing surgery:
Gallop
The day before she turns five, Amy hears
the doctors speak of her galloping heart.
The stethoscope has pressed its hard, cold coin
into her chest. Air empties from the room.
When she is alone, she listens for the horse
that gallops in her ribs, for hoofbeats in her blood.
What she understands is this: tomorrow
they will sleep her, and peel apart the fence
against which the red stallion beats tattoo
and let him out. Then her heart will canter,
walk an ordinary, one-two gait.
But she wonders—will he run into the sky
without her? His wild mane tangle in clouds,
and his hooves spark a starfall beyond the moon?
She sees an empty saddle on his back.
When they open the gate to let him out
(this must be the secret), she will hold on—
she will gallop too.
And the reader along with her.