Child
Ward of the State
By
Eileen Cleary
Main
Street Rag Publishing
Charlotte,
NC
ISBN:
978-1-59948-746-5
56
Pages
$14.00
Review
by Dennis Daly
Poignant
to the point of defining poignancy, Eileen Cleary’s first book of poems, Child
Ward of the Commonwealth, shakes the soul with her truth-telling narratives of
childhood trauma and dysfunction. Cleary somehow melds a mature poetic
sensibility with a child’s wide-eyed ability to see the world’s wreckage with
wonder and awe. Her persona relates adventures of fairy-tale-like brutality,
not unlike fables from the Brothers Grimm. However, Cleary’s anecdotes are not
mythologized; they are direct and very personal.
One
of the collection’s most compelling poems entitled On What to Forget stakes out
the mnemonic territory utilized by Cleary and delivers illuminating slivers of
juvenile reasoning and adult pathos to boot. The piece begins with a four-year
old cowering under a table as the skin of her sister’s arm, aflame from a
kitchen fire, literally melts. Through negative constructions the narrator
tries, through time, to assuage the little girl’s guilt and place it where it
belongs. The poet says,
Not
your mother.
She wasn’t cooking,
didn’t
leave that pan to boil,
didn’t leave her children
under
the porch,
hide-and-go seeking
through
its lattice.
Ready or not here I come!
into
the kitchen,
She wasn’t even there.
Grow
older, grow smaller
because you did nothing, you
did
nothing but hide
Left
to their own devices, human youngsters turn feral like other mammalian
offspring in synonymous circumstances. In her poem When the Social Worker Took
Me, Cleary’s persona explains with perfect juxtapositions and impressive, if hair-raising,
choice of specifics. Consider these lines,
…I
watch
over
myself—teach myself
to
speak. I say lipshick or pisgetti,
poke
holes in my tights, pull snarls
from
my hair, toss and catch
a
puppy on the stairs—I hide
in
an attic, clamor through the halls,
map
my slap-dash kingdom
in
crayon on the walls. The neighbors
dial
phones, shut behind their doors.
Childcare
in the best of circumstances can on a bad day lead to neglect or dubious
disciplinary behaviors. Without the
presence of permanent kinship, the possibilities of cruelty multiply
exponentially. In her piece Toaster the poet describes in straightforward
language one such unseemly incident, an assault on her little brother,
The
baby sitter shouts.
John,
when will you get serious?
She
jams Johnny’s hand
into
the toaster while I freeze,
bury
my own unbuttered fingers
into
the pockets of my jumper.
He
screeches like a barn owl,
hissing,
and flapping his arms
against
the brute walls
of
the too-small room.
Children
on the outside of family life hunger for inclusion. They dream dreams of
especial treatment, stability, and comforting acceptance. A full belly and an
unchangeable name are part of the deal. Denial of these perks breed resentment
and pugnaciousness. Cleary’s poem Foster Care Definition ends via a fantasy culminating
in a very real demand,
I
learn the zebra knows its herd
because
patterns dazzle
their
family names across the green.
I
want my name to dazzle too.
I
begin to wish myself an elephant.
At
St. Boniface’s, St. Mary’s, St. Joseph’s,
St.
Francis’, back to my third grade
report
on pachyderms, how I pray:
make
me an elephant, God.
Let
my skin wrinkle over my hide,
Not
for the size, Not for the skin.
I
want to be family. Let me in.
Throughout
the bulk of these poems the narrator’s mother takes center stage, even when she
is not there. Sometimes it’s not pretty. Family bonds, even in dire
circumstances, resist tampering. Children love unconditionally. The poet’s
piece How the Goldfish deals with strategies of remembrance and forgetting. Here
is the heart of the poem,
My
foster mother tells me forget,
but
not to forget my birth mom
passed
out across the front threshold,
how
we kids only use the back.
So
I forget:
How-dee-dow-dee-diddle
o
Through
our days and how she
Hums
herself into a blanket.
How
after again the ambulance
takes
her, we play Wizard of Oz,
follow
bricks through Flaxen
Park
to a blackbird tower.
How
when she’s back home
we
think we wished her there.
How
even on bad days,
her
scoring paragoric—
Acceptance
and reconciliation with old ghosts can be part of a healing process after years
of hard knocks and open wounds. Cleary’s poem I’m Thinking of Re-entering My
Body delineates such a curative progression. A damaged soul needs to be well
grounded in flesh and blood. The poet’s persona seeks out her earthly shell in
these lines,
We’ll
have this reunion before it
thinks
I’ve died and follows.
While
it’s open to my custody,
keeping
its musts of eat and drink.
When
I re-enter, I like to think
we’ll
scribble its history,
its
journey erasable
without
the ink of me.
Confessional
poetry such as Cleary’s that dwells on brittle emotion and memory is difficult
enough to write. But, when told through the eyes of a child or a maturing adult,
that same poetry becomes both magical and medicinal. An amazing debut of an astonishing poet.
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