By
Lee Varon
Sunshot
Press
ISBN:
978-1-944977-22-1
65
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
How
can one not read this book? From its provocative title—Shot in the Head,
through its narration of adultery, revenge, edgy family lore, religious hatred,
and racial violence, Lee Varon leads her readers to a generational promised
land of understanding and bone-rattling reconciliation.
Varon’s
verse insights of damaged human beings in a deeply flawed culture are
breathtaking. She pieces together her family history by chronicling a close
knit, loving, but paradoxically fraught relationship with her undisputedly bigoted
grandmother. Poetic short lines and stanza breaks both heighten events and
invite atypical considerations of moral dilemmas among kith and kin. As one
reads the geographical happenings of Petersburg, Virginia, circa 1930s, one can’t
miss the contemporary racial and religious implications. In short Varon seems
to have conjured up a psychological portrayal of singular significance.
Beginning
at the epicenter of her explosive lineage, Varon opens her collection with a
poem entitled Millionaire’s Son Shot. Here she introduces her Grandmother in perhaps
her finest dramatic role as the “scorned woman” posturing in the local courthouse.
Then comes her dapper grandfather with his “easy smile” offering the joy of new
car ownership, in better times, before he was shot. Finally the “other woman”
appears with her flirtatious red hair sprinkled with clots of blood in the
aftermath of the shooting. The poet leads into those snapshot introductions
with a set of lush, sensory images,
Better
if he had died
that
night at the farmhouse?
I
have heirlooms:
quilted
satin trimmed with blue velvet,
brilliant
cut diamonds,
turquoise
cufflinks shot through
with
black veins.
But
what seeps into my bones
is
the story of a marriage:
it
began with bluebirds among the crepe myrtle
nearly
ended with the smell of gunshot.
In
Varon’s poem Grandmother Learned the News, the reader enters the grandmother’s sad,
tumultuous world after the shooting of her husband by his lover’s husband. She
is appropriately dressed in mourning clothes after coincidently attending the
funeral of her father. The dastardly facts are bluntly detailed and etched with
ire, but then pathos and wifely duty reign in the moment. Flower buds even
bloom. Here is the heart of the poem,
Your
husband shot
With
that woman,
The
redhead with bold green eyes.
Magnolias
were opening
with
their cream colored
edge
of pink lace,
fireflies
scattered—
and
you were almost a widow.
You
helped your husband home
paralyzed
on his left side,
taught
him to use a spoon
hold
a pen
almost
write
his
name.
To
many thoughtful observers of humanity utter randomness governs the logic of
life with mail-fisted certainty. Varon’s poem Battlefield buys into that theory
by juxtaposing her family’s tragedy with the cataclysmic Battle of the Crater
during the Civil War’s Siege of Petersburg. Consider these alternating stanzas,
The
bullet split in two
part
coming through his left temple
part
embedded in his brain
It slashed a great crater in the earth
… filled with screaming, dying men
If
Lieutenant Douty and Sergeant Reese
hadn’t
volunteered to crawl back in the tunnel
and
relight the fuse
the
crater would not exist,
if
you hadn’t gone to your father’s funeral
your
husband would have come home,
eaten
his chicken dinner,
sat
down with the children
and
played dominoes.
I
don’t think that I’ve ever read any author of poetry or prose who, in his or
her characterizations, exemplifies so well what Hannah Arendt famously called
“the banality of evil” than Varon. She weaves in full-throated tones of love
and hatred with seeming ease. Both of these tones connect in a poem entitled We
Sat Every Night. The piece opens this way,
We
sat every night, watched the news
As
Freedom Riders boarded buses
In
your home state,
Traveled
to Montgomery, Birmingham.
I
was eleven:
The government says colored people can
vote, Nana,
Why are these whites against it?
You:
People up North are always criticizing
us southerners
but the colored are still treated
with more respect here
than most anywhere else.
Pictures
of a scorched bus, people choking
by
the side of the road.
Where is that ‘anywhere else’?
When
I argued with you
you
chalked it up to my tainted Jewish blood—
something
I couldn’t help.
A
few pages earlier in the collection, Varon sets her poem Uncle. Another
relative. Another tragedy. This uncle, after getting engaged to a prohibited
outsider, drops dead at eighteen. The poet recounts her grandmother’s mode of
grieving for her departed son in unvarnished terms,
June
1948—
Thalhimers
Department Store—
a
tuxedo under his arm,
ready
to elope
with
that Catholic girl.
All
Petersburg turned out for his funeral
Grandmother
leading the way,
spikes
of red gladiolas
at
the altar.
After
they lowered his casket
She
lingered over the grave:
I’d rather see him dead
Than married to that girl.
Late
in the collection Varon’s persona sets out independently in a new direction,
notwithstanding the flawed relatives who loved and nourished her. Antagonisms
have turned to knowledge and resolution. Compassion remains. The poet,
addressing both her mother and grandmother, explains,
…
I’ve drawn
a
different course from you.
I
wouldn’t seek it
though
I can understand betrayal. True,
You
gave me the split
bullet
in grandfather’s brain
but
half that shot passed through
as
I passed through your pain
to
the place where love drew
a
picture and the dead
are
stormless now…
For
denizens of today’s troubled world, for those who despair in the face of
generational hatred and prejudice, Varon’s perfect-pitched poetry is required
reading.
