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| Joan Houlihan |
Grief Between and Beyond in Joan Houlihan’s new book Shadow-feast
article
by Michael Steffen
Time
came in and stranded us here,
writes Joan Houlihan in the third poem of her new book, Shadow-feast,
after the Japanese Kage-zen, “a repast…offered to the spirit of
the absent one loved.” The poems chronicle the mourner’s (Hers,
section one) reflections of the dying and death of her husband; the
empathetic raising of the husband’s replies (His,
section two); and (Theirs,
section three) a sequence driven by third-person narrative being
resolved intermittently back into the voice of the mourning wife.
Death,
a dying of one, isolates the couple (as love had in their beginning).
At some point between, we are all social, generally involved in the
community, with our families, helping us shield the exhaustion of I
and thou. Yet lines from the book remind us of the peculiar
solidarity and isolation of a couple’s union. It reminds us of Adam
and Eve dressing themselves as God calls to them in the garden:
We
creaked open, listening. The past stacked high on us,
Day
looked into us. Clarity without remedy… [page 5]
The
meditations bring us vivid awareness of the body as fragile medium of
our affectionate bonds, our “MORTAR”, the composition of the word
metamorphosing through Houlihan to its definition in time as
“mortification,” our sensual undoing, the dissolution of the
mortar itself. The double-jeopardy of possession through memory and
utter loss of physical rapport enjoins upon the mourner in her wake
the dire need to say, to write, to illustrate, to parallel, somehow
to capture and hold this slipping away, through metaphor—“a
sprung chest”—as the cry, perhaps in echoes of Paul McCartney, to
let it be is uttered in turn with poignant lyricism:
Like
a sprung chest, a body opens,
empties
itself at the last.
Let
it be lost. Let it pass.
Where
you are, you went alone
as
cloud huddled cloud, muscled and blown. [page 7]
A
more traditional line on death has leaned toward the generalized
consolation that we are bound by our mortality. Though it comes to us
in thousands of forms, death is all one. It eradicates the prison of
self and mundane suffering of corporal existence. The worst that we
face may be the best we have coming. Like the first encounter with
love, death is dreadful in anticipation.
Yet
Houlihan seeks out the particular in these meditations. Behind the
curtains, half of the labor of grief is dissolution. We are bound to
it, by remembrance and imagination, as we are denied the physical
comforts of and hand’s reach for the other. We are scrutinized of
their hold on us, intricate and elaborate as we conceive the world of
the dead to be.
WHAT
DOES YOUR SEEING WANT?
Your
scrunched eye seizes, sizes
me
up: pulley-roped palliatives, craft and lies.
Washing
my hands in the back, I wonder:
What’s
a good death?
Of
course you held on and I held onto you.
We
had married ourselves to a trance.
The
poet’s question—What’s a good death?—perhaps reminds the
reader of a memorable exchange in the ancient world between the
Lydian King Croesus and the Greek philosopher Solon. Croesus at the
height of his vast wealth and glory rhetorically and somewhat
arrogantly asked the philosopher if he (Croesus) were not a blessed
man. Solon replied it was necessary to wait until somebody’s death
to determine whether they were blessed or not. What’s a good death?
Suffering
helps the dying let go. A friend once told me this. Suffering the
dying should help the attendant let go. Processing and deflection
happen through writing, in the dual work of preserving an image in
its reproduction while gaining perspective on the thing through its
image as it is transformed into a work.
The
book, Shadow-feast,
we have noted, is presented in three dramatic parts, two monologues,
Hers,
His,
and a sort of post script, Theirs.
It’s a work of expressions from imagination—biographically
referential howsoever. This organization and representation lend
remove to the poems, allow us to read them as we might view or read a
play. It also sets the book in perspective as literary genre, with
Rilke’s wonderful poem on assisting the dying “Washing the
Corpse,” or Faulkner’s streaming dramatic novel As
I Lay Dying.
At
the moment of the passing in Shadow-feast,
the point of view quietly shifts into third-person narrative:
STILL
HEARD in her head. They burn what’s left.
And
then he is there again…
…She
served him as mother, as wife,
forced
to bear up his frame… [page 20]
Death
brings us to humanity in its most generic epiphany, where we all go,
and upholds the general inclusive voice of fiction (and also of
religion) to speak from one, masked in others, characters, historical
or fancied, to the many, forming a unity of identity and cause. It
may help to alleviate the mourner of an individual sense of
responsibility or guilt for the deceased who has suffered no more
than the extremity of his or her human condition. We all must.
Though, as the Song
of Songs
reminds us, Many
waters cannot drown love.
The
second section, His,
attests to the powers of empathy which we are privy to any time we
read good fiction. There is, of course, both a reason and a myth to
why Poetry is not stacked in the Fiction section of libraries. In
Poetry there are claims to a rudimentary or primary hold on some
perception of “facts” about the imagination in the way of mimetic
or onomatopoetic speech, prosodic attention, as well as social
anticipation, which oddly sorts poetry off as being more genuine,
maybe in the way of personal essays, than short stories, novels or
drama. Some major critics like Paul de Man writing on Proust or T.S.
Eliot have found it useful to dispel the distinctions between prose
and verse.
It
is interesting to note that the Personae of Shadow-feast
are possessive pronouns: Hers,
His,
Theirs.
This links Shadow-feast
with Houlihan’s two previous book-length poems, Ay
(“I”)
and The
Us,
with their titles collecting human consciousness in nominal pronouns
or suggestions thereof. Houlihan isn’t the only American poet in
our time to defy the sacred self, the inscrutable “I” of Walt
Whitman and his song. A look at the Contents page of Jane
Hirshfield’s recent book, The
Beauty,
finds emphatic anaphora of the first-person possessive, as though for
some question raised by the repetition: “My Skeleton,” “My
Proteins,” “My Eyes,” “My Corkboard,” “My Memory,” “My
Weather,” “In My Wallet I Carry a Card,” “My Task,” “My
Sandwich”… Something here is poking fun, trying to draw attention
to an observation. Are we being too possessive? Too selfish? In the
poem “My Proteins” Hirshfield declares most of her is not
herself, not hers alone:
A
body it seems is a highway,
a
cloverleaf crossing
well-built,
well traversed.
Some
of me going north, some going south.
Ninety
percent of my cells, they have discovered,
are
not my own person,
they
are other beings inside of me. [The
Beauty,
page 9]
Despite
this powerful spell of ultimate subjectivity we have been put under,
there are paths through empathy and belief in collective experience
and power, a common wealth, which can lead us out of over-selfishness
and myopic solipsism. Beginning simply by saying “She,” “He,”
or “They” instead of “I” and “me” “me” “me”. It
changes one’s thinking to write or read and think in another
point-of-view.
Do
you know who you are?
Fist-gripped
onto wheels I am
Made
of what makes my voice.
You
are hurting me.
How
do we find out about others? By asking them, appropriately haunting
as from James Merrill’s oui-jà séances in upper-case letters:
IS
ANYONE hurting you?
Leave
me. I am work. I am legs.
I
am horse shackled to cart.
…
You
are hurting me.
The
near ecstasy survivors are pushed to in order to establish the death
of the dead, this returned cruelty, has been celebrated in the danse
macabre
tradition of medieval times, the figure of a celebrant dancing on the
mound of a grave, right up to our present Halloween, where the limit
of horror and denial cedes to the ludicrous, ludic fun of costumes
and low-down tricks and sweet treats. It lends us a hint of what
defines the Sublime, characterized by a solemnity that borders
dangerously close to the absurd. How often and how naturally laughter
comes to us to resolve or respond to great emotional intensity and
distress. Yeah
right, whatever!
In
the fourth poem of the His
section, images—getting up to “climb the stairs” and failing
to, “choke” and “drown”—echo moments and terms used in the
elusive passing sections, pages
18-22,
of the Hers
section.
This mirroring of fragments of speech in separate accounts of the
same happenings (a method of Faulkner’s in The
Sound and the Fury)
opens the narrative spectrum of Houlihan’s book considerably,
driving home a powerful point, like evidence, to confirm our unease
with it: the speech of the living spirit of the dead processing their
life here
in
the hereafter.
from
Hers
TOO
SMALL for his own robe now, bowed
and
listening to pump and pulse,
he
lets the spoon fall to his lap,
Help
me stand!
Awake,
I
am bound to his call but wait, wait it out,
until
he won’t quiet and I rise again to struggle
him
forward, inch by inch to the edge, then
hook
and hoist him from under the armpits
until
he is almost up, then: no,
no I can’t. Let me down.
[page 18]
from
His
YOU
WERE RIGHT. I couldn’t climb
the
stairs. Breath was all I wore… [page32]
from
Hers
On
ribs bolted small.
I
choke on. Drown in.
Rise
away,
Bone.
[page 21]
from
His
But
I’ll prove I live. I am mute, but thought-loud:
look
at me, this freight I am.
No
air I don’t choke on. No bed I don’t drown in.
I
need to rise but my legs are away.
Then
my bone split, spoke: What
night is this?
[page 32].
It
is at this point the book as a work and not just as a personal
account comes to life. Houlihan achieves the reversal of the other
voice to challenge the narrower lone self’s laments, endearments
and complaints. She achieves a correlative that justifies the
bird’s-eye-view of the couple in the third section, Theirs.
What
did Marianne Moore say about POETRY?
I,
too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
What’s
more genuine than defeat? I’ve wondered. Reading it goes a little
easier than writing. Among other things, poetry opens a space of
re-encounter, re-enactment for the poet, a space of response to that
which has blindsided us and left us for dead. It is at times a court
of law so personal nothing can be won from it though we must plea and
argue as though our lives depended on it. It is laden with
contradictions no public figure could maintain in the public eye
where “media” solicits immediate outcry and opprobrium, where one
day So-and-so stands with this association, another day closer to
elections with its victims. Personally we cannot prevent the hours
turned over one by one that reach to make sense while entertaining
one’s pain and resentment at the burdens of departure and one’s
abiding love across that valley of not-knowing. This love wears at
our armor of denial as it hardens into rhetoric—wears through to
forgiveness which we at once, like Marianne Moore, hold in contempt
and find genuine. It endows us with the gift to balance or equalize
paradox versus weighing off contradictions, lending John Donne the
image and illustration of the compass. It hovers in the margins all
throughout Shadow-feast,
defying conceptualization, my every air-landed stab here to tell you
about it. It is a book that renders beyond tender to patience and
going back and forth.
They
had each other and the one they drag, his breath
on
their tongues, blown blue, head a box-wire
strung
with voice. Wrists poked out,
ankles
raw, pants and shirt too big.
He
lurched and swayed. The look on his face baffled
and
lost. Botched man. They stuffed frost
in
their mouths so not to laugh, kept him alive in their huddle,
his
ice-block chest with their palms, murmuring hotly
into
his neck: don’t
go. [page
45]
Shadow-feast
/ Joan Houlihan
Publication
Date: March 6, 2018 / 978-1-945588-08-2 / Poetry / $15.95 / Paper,
64pp / 6 x 9
Orders:
UPNE 1-800-421-1561 / www.upne.com / Four Way Books, PO Box 535,
Village
Station, New York, NY 10014, publicity@fourwaybooks.com
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