by Susan Tichy
Ahsahta Press 2007
Reviewed by Cate Peebles

Her Own Devices

Susan Tichy’s third full-length collection, Bone Pagoda, is an elegiac travelogue.  The title (which is also the title of the final poem in the collection) refers to an ossuary in Vietnam, constructed from the bones of 30,000 massacred Buddhist monks.  Tichy’s emotional and metaphorical location is Vietnam—the poems weave through tropical scenes, mosquito nets and monks in saffron robes, and instantly flash to glimpses of burning flesh and severed limbs, all the while maintaining a self-conscious formal grip on the ineffability of it all. Tichy seeks to memorialize and speak what cannot be spoken: loss. There are many gaps, spaces and holes within the text and imagery. Her language is ever-conscious of its own failings, “In stuttering etcetera.” The book is intellectually stimulating, and Tichy creates many striking images for the mind’s eye; however, I never hit on an emotional center.

Most of the poems in Bone Pagoda run on the longish side, and all are written in couplets, except for the first (not accidentally called “Couplet”). So overall, the book reads as one long stream of a poem; Tichy opens with the line, “I would call the poem What I Did Not See.” And from here on out we’re reading and viewing from a great remove (time, space, autonomy):

When I see the planes in memory, I’m seeing footage, photographs: I wasn’t there. Images of images I could say, like calling the man in front of you a ghost…I drop now through this sentence…You there; me there; the shooter shot; the one not born yet born.

As the reader, I am even more removed from this past than the speaker is, and that remove is further magnified by Tichy’s overuse of poetic devices, namely repetition. To paraphrase Tyler Durden, “It’s a copy of a copy of a copy.” Tichy doesn’t hesitate to show terrible scenes, yet the terror is dulled by so much repetition, quoting and fragmentation, as in “Museum”:

‘Soaked in petrol and self-burned’
Far down into the photograph

Far down into the photograph
A hammered brass picture of soldiers

  Says my diary, says
Temple-goer servant wood

The mirroring of one line on top of the next is something Tichy does often; it provides flow and keeps the reader skipping from one disjointed phrase and image to the next.  I found the book very easy to read, literally—easy to breeze through its punctuationless lines, which also kept me from feeling much force or contact with any emotional core.  While there are many places to pause within the text, not much lingers in the mind. There are many instances of caesura, little representations of absence, as in “Blazon”:

If one man said      in wonderment
That smell of burned flesh made him hungry

Perhaps this is one of Tichy’s points: we are all desensitized and removed from the reality of such terrible sights and the unnamable emotion that accompanies them. She might also mean to saturate us with them, to bludgeon us into recognizing horror. Either way, I was much too aware of her technical moves throughout—the enjambment and sudden endings, and how these are used to signal silence and the gaps that language cannot fill.

However, these devices can be used to beautiful effect when paired with a stark, indelible image. For example, in one of the shorter poems, “Nui Sam”:

On the steps of the pagoda
A man was begging

A man with no eyes was begging
On the steps of the pagoda

It might be fire it looks like that
[…]

A smooth tight kind of burning
To the bone that might be that

Someone had drawn red circles
Maybe he had drawn them

Someone had drawn red circles
Where his eyes should be

[….]

A place to put your eyes
It might be that

The image itself is striking and made more so by the chanted inflections of the repeated lines.  But then the poem trails off with the anti-climactic repetition of “It might be that” before cutting off into ether. The man with red circles drawn around his empty eye-sockets is the strongest image in the whole book, and the only one that has stuck in my mind after 88 pages.  In this one image, Tichy conveys all she has been grappling with exactly, and in a much more profound way than the exhaustive use of formal turns or edge of the cliff, mid-phrase caesura.  It is, as she says, “A place to put the eyes,” if just for a moment.   

Throughout Bone Pagoda, Tichy struggles with the paradox of memorial: what is gone cannot ever be preserved, and yet we seek to remember and hold on in any way we can.  We’re trapped sticking word to word, trying to conjure the dead. Yet I was never able to blend into these poems and feel the emotional force of Tichy’s subject matter.  I can say I was “moved,” that the book is “thought provoking”—but I can’t say Tichy punches me in the gut or gives me a new experience of the elegy in the way that Mary Jo Bang does in last year’s phenomenal Elegy. The crux and conundrum of Bone Pagoda is that “In a small vocabulary much / ‘Occupied with shot’,” it is impossible to show or tell what is no longer there/here/anywhere. There is extreme pain underlying this but it is drowned out by the disembodied voice(s) of the speaker(s). What I want from these poems is a glimpse into the big, gaping mouth—the horror of “Holy shit, I’m here.” Instead, Bone Pagoda comes across as more of a gasp and gulp while peeking at the abyss in a photograph, through slightly parted fingers.

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