Ruth Baumel |
Judith Baumel, Thorny. Arrowsmith. 2022. 122 pp. $22.00
Review by Ruth Hoberman
Recently
I’ve been thinking about land acknowledgments—those statements that precede
many poetry events these days, recognizing our complicity in the violent
confiscation of the land we stand on.
Judith Baumel’s recent collection Thorny, while not overtly
political, performs some of the same work—complicating our sense of who we are
by insisting on the layers beneath. Thorny
is thorny in the best ways: tangled,
resistant, resilient, complex, deeply rooted in landscape and its histories.
“Passeggiate,”
the book’s first section, is set mainly in Italy—the place Baumel describes in
interviews as her “happy spot,” and where she taught as a Fulbright
scholar. “Passeggiate” is Italian for
“stroll”: the poems suggest the rewards
of walking, looking, absorbing; but each at some point also digs beneath the
moment into the past. In “Hic Adelfia
Clarissima Femina,” for example, a contemporary observer describes the
elaborately carved sarcophagus of Adelfia, at Syracuse: “I want to look this
way and be looked at this way,” she says, of the husband and wife carved into a
fluted shell at the sarcophagus’s center:
Turned toward each other but askew, as if the planes
of our shoulders were made for different
vanishing points and still impose flesh
on each other’s flesh.
Husband and wife exist in different
planes and will, in death, be separated, but with effort come together in
life: “I find him in sleep/from another
country, a momentary act of will.” The
reward of “crossing the border to seek that sheltering coast” is sensual
intimacy, ample compensation for the “thorny labor of marriage.” But then the poem shifts its focus as a piece
of music might change key: looking backwards to Eden, where joy was already
inseparable from suffering. “When He
damned the soil into which we return,/Yahweh gave us the mercy of pains in
birth and bread.”
These
shifts add context and poignancy. In “Passeggiate
and Cena in Erice” (Stroll and Dinner in Erice), for example, sightseers admire
cobblestones, shops, flower pots; but
here, too, the present is haunted by “the petitions of the past,” when intruders arrived in waves—“came and left
their Y chromosomes with the Ierodule,” the local priestess-prostitutes. Then
the poem returns to dinner: swordfish
and couscous. “The local salt,” its speaker concludes, “was almost rosy, almost
sweet/with iodine and tasted of sacrifice.”
Literary
and mythological figures turn up as speakers in some poems. Meliboeus and Tityrus, for example, arrive
from Virgil’s first eclogue to talk over 9/11, placing our disaster in the
context of Augustus Caesar’s land confiscations following the Civil War. And in “On the Death of Boys,”
the three Greek Fates discuss motherhood and loss with Nyx, Greek goddess of
night. “What were the boys thinking?”
Nyx asks, of four teenage boys from the Bronx who drowned in an ill-judged
effort to row a boat from City Island to Hart Island on a January night. Clotho (who spins the thread of life),
Lachesis (who measures), and Atropos (who snips) point out the role of bad
judgment as well as the ironies provided by Hart Island’s history: “a heap/of
bad ideas,” it has been a prison, a hospital, and a Potter’s Field. “Stop,” Nyx
interrupts, giving voice to modern as well as ancient mothers’ complaints: “You
spin their flesh, measure their nine months, cut the cord so they are not
ours.” Don’t finish your sentence, she begs.
But Clotho has the last word, relentless, insistent on the cyclicity of
life and death.
The
book’s second section, “The American Cousins
A-Z,” is lighter, brisker, in its portrait of Jewish immigrant life, though
here, too, history haunts: In “Proem: ‘A Vort Far a Vort’” (the Yiddish
title of a book by Scholem Aleichem), we learn of those who stayed behind,
blurred figures in the German photographs documenting their slaughter. But each had a name, the speaker
insists; each, in fact, was a “library
of infinity.” In the poems that follow,
scenes speed by of Catskill resorts, Alexander’s
department store, conversations in which the cousins exhibit their
acculturation and their anxiety at once. “Long treks ended for the lucky/in
this land of pizza,” Baumel notes in “Z: Ziggurat.”
More
specifically, “long treks” end in the Bronx, where many of the book’s final
poems are set. In this final section,
“Bound,” the journeys are in time, not space.
“I am assembling those who are gone like a doll party,” one speaker
says. The culmination is “Gueule de
Bois” (Hangover), a gorgeous summation of wonder and regret. Here the speaker contemplates her past by way
of Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting of Suzanne Valadon looking glum beside a bottle
of wine. “Plenty of mistakes we see
coming/and can’t stop, won’t stop,” she says, thinking of her own hangovers
long ago. But now, “a hangover is about
time”—the way past moments return, “the way/the smell and the pour bring
distant ghosts/forward to the spilled circle, bring regret and promises to bear
against the future.” Is what happened next something we could have
changed? Or are we “bound”? Anyone of a certain age looks back and
wonders. And here both poem and book
end, with a hypothetical, poignant supposition:
“As if, perhaps, the future just proceeds/upon the street, the cold of
April rain/on the rangy disappointments of forsythia.”
No comments:
Post a Comment