By Jennifer Arin
Dos Madres Press
ISBN: 978-1-933675-71-8
59 Pages
Review by Dennis Daly
Memento mori! Yes, but
remembering death as an intellectual construct brings with it unrelenting
despair and crushing anxiety. Our metaphysically canny species needs to reach
out and hold something or someone when facing the abyss. The acceptance of
reality needs a counterbalance. Here, on cue, enters the magician, who passes
the wand over the stove-pipe hat and pulls the inevitable rabbit out by his
long ears. Behold art. Behold poetry. Behold Jennifer Arin’s poetry.
In the poem Reason for Being an
Emperor on Horseback the poet flashes us a snapshot of her internal spirit crashing
through the dense forests of ignorance, defeating the old ghosts and demons
plaguing our world. The story line charges in, unabashedly romantic, and the
tone feels self-assured, stark, and stubborn. It’s a short poem and here is a
good part of it,
…I navigate;
to clear a path through the
expanse,
to chase away ghosts and demons
from the heavy, hanging branches;
ride swift
from where I am to where
I wish: take in
the shaded world ahead.
The poet’s persona, in a piece
entitled Love Poem for a Larger Scheme of Things, uses the most common chores
of human connections, laundry and food shopping, to cope with death while, at
the same time, facing the unpleasant details of its occurrence. She says,
…We fold
each other’s sheets, match
corners,
and turning edges
of a page in the journal for
Chris
I have the same sense of
something
missing needlessly…
She then describes Chris’ death
under an 18-wheel truck. There’s no flinching here. An altar in the cereal
aisle concludes this unusual but effective matching of images,
At the neighborhood store
where he worked, friends place
a book of thoughts like these,
though more heaven bent, near
an altar on the cereal shelf,
stacked
boxes of Life beside it…
Perhaps the most provocative poem
in Arin’s marvelous book, Forces of Nature, rubbed me the wrong way the first
time I read it. I mistakenly thought it overly sentimental, self-absorbed, and ultimately
cruel. Wrong on all counts! This formal poem of seven stanzas is
beautifully lyrical with an aabb ccdd rhyme scheme. The poetic structure ups
the tempo and carries the story line to its frantic and seemingly feel good
conclusion. The poet finds an injured sandpiper struggling in the surf, obvious
prey for predatory birds or the incoming tide itself. As if that isn’t enough a
pit bull makes a bid to dispatch the bird. But our poet will have none of it.
She next delivers the creature into the hands of a veterinarian who, reasonably
enough, offers to put the bird to sleep. Note the phraseology. The poet revolts
and the poem ends this way:
Mad as the new rain, I try a
desperate last plan;
the aviary, refuge from all
predators, can—
and will—care for this fragile
life.
Witness: it survived nature’s
ready knife.
A new reality has been set up by
this writer—an aviary of art. Her struggle against nature and fate comes close
to madness. But it’s not. Here she seems intent on sculpturing the curves and
angles of a new kind of being, who continues to battle, knowing the war is lost
but choosing to ignore that fact.
In Giving Up the Ghost {Writing}
Arin’s persona swears off euphemisms for death’s finality. She says,
…whether passed or defunct,
gone, expired, retired—should be
debunked;
they offer no more comfort than
the other side,
rest, departure, quietus, or Great
Divide.
Such evasions should be our
permanent loss,
should bite the dust, buy the
farm …
So far— humorous and clever— but
no more. Then Arin hits you with this last couplet,
Each term, despite itself, is a
memento mori—
Just as no verse can reverse what
isn’t transitory.
Pretty neat!
The poet also makes use of time
to hold on. In the poem Keeping Time,
measuring time and the awareness of its divisions gives humans a sense of
control. Maybe there is an eternity between two points. Starting with a 37,000-year-old
calendar bone found in Africa, Arin gives her own little history of man’s
attempt to control the march of time and thereby postpone death. She concludes it
this way,
..If I only had one
more day, a friend says will be
his
epitaph. All of ours if we can’t
better
measure our presence in this
world,
the timeless part of us hungry
to count itself: I’m here, I’m
here!
Time’s an escape artist anyway.
Arin broadens this theme in the
poem Unified Theory. She insists that understanding our universe and its
continued expansion gives us a better foothold on it. It matters how things fit
together. She puts things in perspective,
In ancient Greece, they
understood
multiplicity, mere appearances
of a single truth.
It is our place
to remember that the many
stem from one.
There is no place
not ours.
Within Jennifer Arin’s poetry her
well-wrought measures span out, seem to bridge the shaded abyss to the forested
chaos beyond. I hope they do. That’s all
any poet can hope for.
