Dear Sphereans:
David Berman has asked me to post the following, which I am quite glad to do. Only thing is, since David doesn't have
on-line access, he won't be able to respond to anything you post. Please note, too, that given my technical imcompetence, I have had, on occasion, recourse to methods of substituting for italics and indention that might not meet David's standards! That understood,...
Rhina Espaillat has been accused by Joseph Salemi of publishing a book of "nicey-nice" poetry. No dictionary that I own contains any such word as "nicey-nice." I am familiar with the word "nice-nelly," which my dictionary defines as "PRUDISH" or "marked by euphemism." Fortunately, in his review Mr. Salemi more or less defines what he means by "nicey-nice." It refers to "poems that celebrate a sanitized and fumigated world where unpleasant things never happen, or if they do, where they can be expalined away with a reassuring trope that puts us all at our ease." According to Mr. Salemi, the appropriate analogy is to the work of Norman Rockwell, which is "constricted and ultimately shallow, [l]ife without suffering, tragedy, violence, and evil" and "not life as we know it." How should one answer Mr. Salemi? If there is a reassuring trope that puts us all at our ease, I have never heard it or heard of it. I doubt its very existence. If life has taught me anything, it has taught me that whenever someone or someones are eased, someone else must be discomfited. The thought of a blissful afterlife may brighten the heart of a saint, but the hopeless sinner may be just as happy to believe that there will be no afterlife. The D student may be relieved to learn that his final exam has been cancelled and all students will recieve a "pass" in the course, but the A student may be disappointted.
But enough of sparring with shadows! If I have ever read a book of poetry in which unplesant things never happen or, if they do, are explained away, it has been so long ago that I forgot it--so totally that I doubt I ever read it. Even in nursery rhymes very unpleasant things happen. Jack breaks his head and Jill follows. Humpty Dumpty has a great fall. Poor Little Miss Muffet is frightened away. If Mr. Salemi ever finds a published book of poems that shows life without suffering tragedy, violence or evil, I hope that he will be kind enough to let others know about it. If only for its uniqueness, it could be an interesting read.
"Rehearsing Absence," the book by Ms. Espaillat that Mr. Salemi reviewed, is most assuredly not such a book. It is justly the winner of the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award. I say that as one who had a book entered in that contest. Perhaps Mr. Salemi was so bewitched by Ms. Espaillat's magnificent use of form that he forgot to look beyond the form to the substance of the poems. Whatever his problem--and it is his problem--he has set up the proverbial straw man so that he can knock it down. Reality is that there is not a single poem in this book that does not have at least a sense of foreboding about it. Even the poem about a cherished wedding ring, "A Love Poem, Off Center," reminds us that love involves "human fumbling." The last stanza of this poem reads:
so patient years refashion
what hours undo,
and circles not quite circles
somehow close true.
To me this is the tone of poignant resignation. And this is probably the least troubling poem in the whole collection.
Another poem that Mr. Salemi savages is "Nightline." It is a poem about two boys who massacre their classmates at a high school, possibly the boys responsible for the Columbine shooting. Mr. Salemi purports to see in this poem a suggestion that the murderers acted as they did because of a "mistake made over breakfast once." He crudely misses the point. What the poet is actually saying is how fortunate she is that it is not her sons who were the murderers. She does not know why these boys behaved as they did or what leads anyone to "grow such scorn for ordinary flesh...." Could it have happened to me, she asks, putting herself in the place of the boys' parents. "There but for the grace of God go I" has rarely been rendered so aptly.
One of my own favorite poems in "Rehearsing Absence" is "Variations." After noting that her son resembles her father but that son has an "unwounded" face, the poet tells us in the last strophe:
Such grave harmonics lend us back
the only paradise we know:
an idle game with time, but still,
not bad, as resurrections go.
I shall admit that I wish the comma after "still" were gone. That said, however, the tone, again, of poignant resignation borders on the magical. There is nothing nicey-nice about it.
I could go on, but it would be pointless. Many of the poems in "Rehearsing Absence" deal with death, in all of its deprivation and mystery. Perhaps poems about death put Mr. Salemi at ease. There is, however, one paragraph in the review that left me very uneasy. Seizing on the poem "Their Only Child," Mr. Salemi notes that Ms. Espaillat was an only child. This happens to be true, but certainly it is not true simply because the poem describes the feelings of an only child. For all that the poem says, the only child could have been friend or someone about whom Ms. Espaillat had read or heard. In any event, Mr. Salemi then goes on to tell us that only "children sometimes come to think of themselves as the center of the universe which must bend to their whims." Apparently, children with siblings, at least in Mr. Salemi's experience, do not show such signs. Or maybe they only sometimes do. As a poem not by Ms. Espaillat goes,
The end is always hard
except when it is not;
my friend remembered that;
except when he forgot.
Any attemnpt to explain Miiss Espaillat's poetry in terms of the presence or absence of siblings in her family ought to be considered beneath contempt. Such an explanation, alas, says much more about the reviewer than it could possibly say about the reviewed.
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