Review by Barbara Bialick
In The Regret of a Flower, Gail Thornton shows that even in the adversity of physical and mental illness, the human spirit moves toward love and creativity. As she writes in the title poem, “You have taught me to accept/compliments gracefully,/because when I cut them/too close to the bud,/what I have is a stem/and a dead plume in my hand/taking up all of the space/where the love should be.” She has had to live with both polio and bipolar illness and yet she points out “I’m as varied as the sea,/words rolling out of me/in a tempest/…The turn of a phrase:/salt tears, refreshing me/as it spills onto the page-my naked world at midnight.”
Indeed she dedicates the collection to “my true love, Frank, without whom my poetry would lose its song in my heart.”
As she has moved through life, she discovered that people can love each other in different ways, even in the bustle of a writing workshop. In “Drunk as Drunk On Neruda” she writes, “Finally, it was poetry that united us/we worked together on a poem/we both wished we had written/…we made love to the printed page and said goodbye without a touch…”
Indeed poetry is an important part of her life. Creativity trumps the alternative, which is to feel only pain. “Poetry is not horizontal-It grows like the Baobab/into the desert of my heart/groping for last year’s rain.”
In “Bipolar Ballroom” she can only wonder at the “Head bangers in my bedroom,/in my head room;/thoughts pile up like compost/fed by my baby tears./My fears, years of faking it/taking/then losing it, losing it/…Dreams keep five dialogues/in unison/Shouting.”
She also thinks back in “Polio and the Family House” which says, “You held me/captive in your rooms,/stretched taught, like sheets between trees./You held me while I lost my limbs;/The House:/Grinning,/keeps our faces tacked to the past…”
Writing poetry, however, can be a companionable activity. “The inkwell really my/unconscious dream/…reading/each line, as one would/the correspondence/from a faraway friend.”
Gail Thornton lives in a small town in Massachusetts. She has read poetry at the Boston Center for the Arts and at Newton Free Library. She has attended poetry workshops at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education as well as the William Joiner Center for War and Its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts Boston. You can read “Gail Thornton’s World” at gailthornton.blogspot.com.
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