Misery Islands
By
January Gill O’Neil
CavanKerry
Press
Fort
Lee, NJ
ISBN:
978-1-933880-46-4
78
Pages
$16.00
Review
by Dennis Daly
Some
islands bask under an equatorial sun, massaged by gentle trade winds and
tickled by turquoise water. Others offer stony, unforgiving shores, dangerous
channels, and wreckage of grander days, with only the icy winds of desperate
hope and final survival to mitigate the landscape.
It’s
these “other” islands and their human iterations that January O’Neil dwells on
in her dolorous but passionate new book of poetry, Misery Islands.
Opening
the collection O’Neil audaciously fleshes her persona out in Whitmanesque
fashion as everyman and, even more emphatically, everywoman. She identifies
with those left behind and challenged by difficult circumstances, those storm
tossed isles navigating daily life. Her persona drops words onto the page from
a whirlwind of transitory motion. The poet says,
I
am every mill town and boarded-up factory,
the
assembly line disassembled, the layoffs,
layaways,
and laid to rest.
I
put the depressed into depression
I
am America reconstructed; I am a force at work.
I
dig a ditch, I fill a ditch.
My
collar is white, my collar is blue.
I
am missing 23 cents out of every dollar
a
woman is supposed to earn
but
doesn’t.
I
am every God damn it and Lord have mercy.
O’Neil’s
poem Rent To Own follows the routine of an older guy with bad knees as he
cleans used furniture, removing the unsightly detritus from the bottom strata
of human life. Her bigger theme that we are all just passing through in this
life bolts up, volcano-like, through the messy details. Here’s a pretty telling
section,
You’d
be surprised how many people
pick
their noses and leave the evidence
under
the arm of an armchair, he tells me.
Roaches,
bed bugs, pet hair, dander—
you
name it, it’s there, in the fibers,
the
polyester pillows and dense cushions.
Steam
vapor removes almost anything,
even
tar from a chaise owned by a guy
who
works at an asphalt company,
working
his ass off in 10-hour shifts
to
afford his slice of America.
Tension
between the roles of mother and child settles into an intimate and singular
series of motions. The business-like care giver unfurls not only a washcloth
but a sense of profound gratitude and love. O’Neil conveys the scene with
affecting sentiment and dignity. Individuals, islanders, in other words, do make
a difference. I really like the piece. The poet concludes this way,
She
reaches around for the cloth
with
slow and deliberate movements
as
if not to admit pain, not to convey need—
the
caregiver needing care, the care taker
not
taking as she usually does. Not today.
I
want to tell her I love her
but
I don’t. I cover her with a towel
and
some small talk, try not
to
notice what’s missing.
No
words, yet I listen
like
a stethoscope
for
her to say something.
Putting
into words the carnage of a marriage breakup confounds many of the best
writers, most especially over sensitized poets. I can think of a recent
Pulitzer Prize winner for instance. O’Neil handles this subject with just the
right touch as her warmed up words chill and disappear into a midwinter’s frigid
air. Her sentiments court despair with humor and astonish with tight artistic
control. The poet aches out her feelings in an touching conclusion,
I
can’t compete with the failing light
from
your voracious heart
burning
us both into nothing.
Something
has left us.
Every
droplet of joy evaporates
to
sky. When will melt come?
How
could anyone blame you
for
wanting to escape
the
coldest month of the year?
Like
Homer’s Penelope, O’Neil weaves heartbreak and metaphor into one composition.
Her title poem, Misery Islands, opens with a narrative description of two
wondrous and tenuously connected islands off the coast of Salem Massachusetts—Great
Misery, and Little Misery. Both are now uninhabited. Each island has its own
personality and its own geologic traits. The poet also splices in other
historical, tidal, and climate particulars of the islands which strangely
magnify the emotional discomfort of the interwoven and parallel marital
distress narrative. Consider the following juxtaposition. First the historical,
set on Great Misery in the “roaring twenties,”
Imagine
a pier, a club house,
a
swimming pool filled with salt water,
guest
cottages to the horizon line,
a
tennis court and tournaments,
a
nine-hole golf course with caddies
dressed
in pressed white linens.
So
elegant, so glamorous a setting,
You
can almost see a couple
Looking
out over a balcony,
Hands
entwined, the moon
Hanging
over them
By
the thin thread of midnight.
Now
the equally compelling glory days before the marriage collapse,
I
loved. You loved. We loved
with
our whole selves—
lips
first, then the tumble of skin
pulling
each other down,
caught
in the tangle and swirl,
closer
to terror, closer to ourselves
the
way we became something else
as
soon as we were in it
the
way our bodies displaced truth
through
the depths of anger,
the
way it changed us
and
we were changed by it.
We
were poor swimmers
Too
far in the rip to be saved.
Late
in the collection, another favorite of mine, the poem A Mother’s Tale appears.
The poem whispers easily a harsh truth—life’s ephemeral nature. The poet’s
persona speaks to her son and offers an interesting antidote to the human
condition and its concomitant isolation. She says,
I
tell my son
that
the best poems
are
written in the sand
and
washed away with the tide.
I
say the moon controls the waves,
It
is an open invitation to fill
The
world with words…
O’Neil
clearly follows her persona’s sage advice. She fills the world with her
extraordinary poetic words, and we get to read them.
No comments:
Post a Comment