The Uneaten
Carrots of Atonement
by Diane Lockward
Wind Publications, 2016
101 p.
ISBN 978-0-9969871-1-0
Reviewed by David P. Miller
I laughed out loud – with pleasure –
at my first look at the cover of The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement,
Diane Lockward’s fourth collection of poems. For a start, the title
itself put me in mind of religious allegory gone off the rails, like
a surrealist Pilgrim’s Progress. And Brian Rumbolo’s
watercolor illustration, of a rabbit with two intact carrots in its
paws, seemed weirdly hilarious, given its baleful expression. It says
something about the complexity of Ms. Lockward’s work, though, that
when we read the poem in question, the laugh sticks in the throat.
We’ll come to this later on.
Diane Lockward’s verbal dexterity is
stunning, evidence of a ceaseless power of image-making. “Rampant
imagination,” I said to myself many times, reading this volume.
It’s hardly possible to select any so-called best examples, so here
are some presented almost at random. In “Thinking Like a Buddhist,”
the speaker’s sight of a dead grackle swarmed with flies – a
mundane backyard tragedy – leads eventually to
[ …] Where do birds
go to die?
Why isn’t the earth
littered wrens, their wings folded,
eyes like glass
beads? Why has no jogger ever been
pelted with deceased
sparrows? Shouldn’t dead crows
be blocking the
entrance to the Shop-Rite, blue jays lying
on highways? How do
birds arrange their deaths in places
so obscure no one
ever finds the bodies, like those corpses
dumped by mobsters
into vacant lots and construction sites?
And the avian death speculations don’t
end there. “How I Dumped You” might be read as the ultimate
revenge/breakup poem, but goes so far beyond in relentlessness that
you can barely pause to laugh:
I violated a local
ordinance and hurled you like a bagful
of dog-doo onto
someone else’s yard, tossed you like
watermelon rind after
a picnic, like a brown banana peel,
like a used Kleenex,
like a dead chipmunk. I scraped you
from the sole of my
sneaker like a wad of chewed-up gum.
At least three poems explicate the
nuances of colors. “The Color of Magic” elaborates red in at
least two dozen dimensions (though taking a count is somewhat futile)
and “Why yellow makes me sad” – the title a quotation from a
Geico commercial – presents that color in a deluge of variations.
It’s “A Polemic for Pink,” though, that may present the
greatest surprise. After thirty-eight lines of praise for this often
deprecated color, including –
I like a color that
dares to be outrageous, but doesn’t
mind going soft and
pink as a watered-down communist,
that eschews the
ideological red of marinara
for the creamy
compromise of pink sauce.
– we’re brought up at the close by
this: “And Jackie Kennedy in the back of a black / Lincoln
Continental, her pink Chanel suit like a drift / of blossoms blown
across her husband’s body.” This sensibility, where ebullience
lives cheek-by-jowl with terror, lies in wait throughout the entire
volume, to this reader’s endless delight.
Lockward presents poems where the
speaker’s identification with animal and plant life supersedes
anthropomorphism. The voice is that of a kind of fusion not reducible
to speaking in the Other’s voice. This can be difficult to
untangle. In “Where Feathers Go When They Fall,” for example, the
speaker imagines herself into a kind of bird consciousness but never
declares “now I know how birds feel” or something to that effect.
The latter variant on the persona poem is valued by many, but seems a
shaky enterprise to me, at least so far. Instead, the poet’s own
imagined transformation is given:
[ … ] Home is a tree
now, children
hatched
and gone, none to
peck
my heart. I do not worry
or grieve, only imagine them
in tall trees, too high for
cat’s paw, and go back
to fumbling for
worms.
“Eminent Domain” features a speaker
unambiguously human, but so melded with animal suffering that, beyond
pity, she takes action almost without thought. A “large and
terrifying” dog has killed a daughter’s pet rabbit, “a bundle
of white fur, ruined, blood-spattered.”
Slowly she removed
her belt, wrapped it around her fist,
buckle end in palm,
as her father had done, and whipped
the dog, again and
again, made it whimper and cry,
then untwirled the
leather and struck with the buckle
until the dog ran,
its fur streaked with blood.
You will notice the startling, and
fleeting, reference to the father, from whom she evidently learned
the practice of beating. You can be grateful, too, for the dog as a
scapegoat, as the mother
[ … ] waited for
hours on the porch, a mother at last,
waiting to explain to
her child that sometimes what we love
goes away and doesn’t
come back. She would not speak
of revenge, how it
had seized her, how good it had felt,
knowing she could
split a boulder with her fist.
A poem’s title has many potentials,
including seduction and betrayal. It’s easy to imagine someone
scanning the table of contents, spotting “I Want to Save the
Trees,” and passing it by with tree-hugger assumptions. Or, maybe,
turning directly to the poem with the same assumptions. Neither
reader will be prepared for the poem’s eventual dissolving of
boundaries between the speaker, the objects of her attention, and the
fauna Others.
[ … ] On my knees,
I beg the oak’s forgiveness.
If I’d known that
the filthy knife wielder was rotten
as a diseased Dutch
Elm, I would not have let him
shove in his blade
and carve a heart into the bark,
his initials and mine
forever locked inside,
my tree wounded,
forever tattooed like a prisoner.
It is not simply that the speaker
expresses sorrow for the damage done to a tree, but that her own
woundedness is locked into the bark; the one-time lover is also
condemned to his own tree life, “with his heart // rot and his ring
of lies, his roots weak and shallow / as the willow’s uprooted in
last winter’s storm.”
The poems already cited here indicate
another thread running through this work, that of the permanent
ambiguity of human relationships, particularly within the family,
with partners and lovers. “Original Sin” puts the book’s title
and cover in its (actually shocking) context. Lockward tells how her
sister pulled off the tail of their pet rabbit, but that she took the
blame rather than defend herself:
I wondered then and
wonder still why I took
the blame for hurting
the pet I’d loved. I only know
that once Karen said
I’d done it and my father
looked at me as if I
had, I was guilty,
as guilty as those
unbaptized babies
in Purgatory.
The rabbit did not survive, leading us
to this: “Her sweet body, already stiff, / lay among the uneaten
carrots of atonement.” The mastery is that, 1) the metaphor remains
outrageous, but 2) at the same time, the image burns, and there is no
resolution.
In contrast, “Your Beard, I Love It
Not” is a riotous denial of an ardent lover’s facial prowess, and
another instance of the poet’s unstoppable invention:
Take a blade and hack
it off—that birdless nest,
that crumb catcher,
chinful of tumbleweed, duck
blind, lice hotel,
that bugaboo of children, that pile
of leaves I dare not
dive into.
Although this poem drives toward one
specific possibility — “Let me be / your Delilah, lost in the
wild field of your face” — sustained relationships cannot really
be surmised, only imaged. The title of “The Seasons of a Long
Marriage” suggests one of those “how did we get here, hubby”
paeans, but of course it is no such thing. Images of late autumn bend
toward the twinning of decay and persistence. The speaker, attempting
to clean glass doors shone through by the sun, finds
[ … ] though I’ve
squeegeed them
twice in two days,
smudges
show on the other
side.
Some spots just can’t
be removed.
They’re here
forever. Like scars.
The autumn and the marriage, not
otherwise noted, come together only in a near-glancing conclusion:
“Soon the green ground will be covered / with snow. The days turn
cold. / My husband’s hair is gray.”
Two final poems are linked in a kind of
inverse relationship. “Signs” is written in spacious couplets:
the speaker tentatively, perhaps gratefully takes the observations of
an outdoors walk and finds in them tokens on a path out of darkness:
[ …] To stand
beside the playground
to gaze at the giant
concrete turtle, without hating
the young mothers
whose children climb across
its capacious back. [
… ]
[ … ] the turtle is
now
your emblem, and if
you’re lucky, which you are,
those you have shut
out, those you have hurt
with the hard shell
of your silence will somehow
still love you and
you will move toward them,
carrying the ancient
notched shell, your back
uncrushed by its
weight, the mystery
of its hieroglyphics
unfolded and laid at their feet.
The collection’s emblem reappears: “a
soft // rabbit still lives inside you and after its long sleep / rubs
its pink eyes”. But this is not the volume’s conclusion. The
final poem, “And Life Goes On As It Has Always Gone On,” presents
endless one-damn-thing-after-another contingencies in one relentless
verse paragraph. Here again we have Diane Lockward’s breathtaking
verbal fecundity:
Bees built nests
under the eaves of your house.
They hunt you down
and stab you many times
with their tiny
switchblades—even your lips
while you’re eating
a ham sandwich.
Blinded by an armful
of fresh towels, you fall
down the stairs while
rushing to answer the phone.
Your vertebrae
shattered, that call from your lover
forever unanswered,
sex forever impossible.
“Are you looking for compensation? /
A rabbit nibbling the grass—does that console?” she asks later
on, and yes we are looking, and no, we don’t know if the rabbit
will help. What saves this from ordinary bleakness is the evident
reveling in the world as it is, the sustained curiosity that makes
such detail possible. “Life goes on as it has always gone on,”
yes. And also yes, there are “Signs” infused in every moment.
Both are inevitable, and there is not really a choice between them.
The book includes a couple of
production errors. Two poems are missing from the table of contents:
“In Defense of the Cashew” (page 31) and “August 11: Morning
Prelude” (page 55). Also, the tercet structure of “Losing
Daylight” is not well served by the break between pages 57 and 58
(compare “Where Feathers Go When They Fall”). I hope that this
remarkable collection sees additional printings, or another edition,
so that these may be remedied and the presentation of Diane
Lockward’s astonishing work becomes immaculate.
